Trilliums as Kin in Victorian Archives

It had been a long winter, gray skeletons scraping a gray sky on my drive over the gray mountains to North Carolina to visit my gray, dying granddad. At the first sign of tender green scattering across the land, my cousin and I headed for the woods. We hiked the Fiery Gizzard trail on the Tennessee side of the Southern Appalachians, wandering past waterfalls full with the swell of spring rains and through enchanted glens carpeted with spring’s early flowers. Our hearts got lighter with every bloom we crouched to see. We delighted in the dozens of trilliums—yellow trilliums, the deep bruise purple Longbract trilliums, and pure snowy white trilliums.

As a child of North Carolina, I have always felt March’s first wildflowers to be my birthright and responsibility due in part to my family’s long attention to plant life. Learning plant names over the years and anticipating and celebrating their arrivals connected me to my dad, who knows every plant; to my grandma, a gardener who died when I was little; to my great grandparents on tobacco farms; and beyond them, to the hills and mountains themselves. Plants and the people who care for them make up my home and my ancestry.

This fall, I moved to Wisconsin, a thirteen-hour drive from my previous home in North Carolina. I’ve traveled outside the southeast before, but I’ve never been gone for as long as the six-year graduate program that I signed up for here. In Wisconsin, I am acutely aware of my accent, the night in a hotel required for the drive home, and my ignorance of the local plants and animals.

I spent the month before classes started looking up every neighborhood plant on iNaturalist, studying the signs identifying prairie flowers at nearby Governor Nelson State Park, and reading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac like the Bible before bed each night. I needed to make my home here. To me, home means knowing the names of my neighbors, human and plant, and learning their stories and habits, caring for them like I hope they’ll care for me. Making a home means seeking out ways to make plants kin, in the past, present, and future.

Victorian Herbariums

I haven’t learned the names of all that many plants since I’ve been here, kept busy by my classwork. But one of my classes brought me to the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives and Special Collections, where I found a little bit of home, at the end of a trail featuring a special elevator that climbed nine floors up Memorial Library. We were invited to explore the archives like naturalists spreading out over a field, learning the ecosystem of the library.

In my search, I found something I later learned to call an “herbarium,” an album or collection of dried plant specimens. Today, botanists use herbariums to study specimens and ecosystems, following professional standards and procedures. The archive’s herbariums were more like the booklet I used to paste leaves into as a child. Made by amateur women collectors in the 1880s and 1890s, they featured plants messily glued and stitched to paper, often arranged in artistic bouquets or sandwiched between other plants of little to no relation.

The album I treasured most was by Anna C. Morrison, a Wisconsin resident who filled her book with beautiful blooms in 1883. The cover was a deep, worn green, with the title “Herbarium” in a gilt, decorative font across the center. A label inside the cover noted that the book had been purchased from Edward Quinn, “Blank Book Maker and Bookseller” at 427 E. Water St. Milwaukee. The address is a block from the Milwaukee River and now stands between two major highways carrying cars past at 70 miles an hour. While Mr. Quinn’s bookshop is long gone, Anna’s carefully chosen blossoms persist.

Inside the book, dried plants arranged in artistic bouquets and sprigs live on in various states of disrepair, each so thin I had to run my fingertips over them to assure myself they weren’t printed onto the page. Their colors have faded into silver green leaves and flowers of rust or parchment, and each specimen leaves a ghostly stain of itself transferred onto the back of the opposite page.

Dating back to the Victorian era, the herbarium is representative of a Victorian orientation to the world emphasizing man’s control over nature while simultaneously viewing nature as evidence of a Christian god’s bounty. This attitude sparked a craze for classification, leading Victorians to invent new taxonomical systems, create museums filled with “exotic” trophies stolen from colonies, host “freak shows” that challenged the limits of audiences’ understandings, and fill their living rooms with “curiosities” from the natural world.

These two guiding perspectives of control and religion also met in the herbarium, which flattened and decontextualized nature into a specimen to be studied, understood, and admired. In fact, upper-class women were educated on understanding god’s creation through studying the soft and beautiful things in life as well as teaching these lessons to children. Plant collecting was framed as a hobby of leisure-class white women that offered gentle exercise, appropriate aesthetic entertainment, and moral and religious training.

While male scientists went on expeditions and discovered new species, Victorian women were encouraged to collect plants from walks near their homes, an extension of the domestic space. Misogyny dictated these bounds, but one beneficial side effect was that common plants were preserved by women even as they were dismissed by male scientists.

The Art of Noticing Trilliums

Anna C. Morrison collected common flowers like buttercups, dandelions, and daffodils. She found flowers in different stages of blooming, and she labeled each in a delicate penciled cursive in both Latin and English. Most people then and now think of dandelions and buttercups as weeds, worthy only of the attention it takes to eradicate them to make a smoother lawn. Anna, however, bounded though she was by gendered constraints, spent her days learning the wonders of the common. She looked down and saw treasures between her feet.

In a world where the drive towards classification was fed by racism that sought to classify the human species, and where the urge to collect led to the pillaging of colonies around the world, Anna’s attention to her home matters. While she surely was complicit in global structural violence, and her leisure hobby was a privilege not all could enjoy, she did exercise care for the often-overlooked plants at home.

Anna deepened her understanding and care for that world through the way she used her attention. In 2021, a different Anna—Anna Tsing—writes about the “arts of noticing,” which she sees as a tool for living in a time of precarity, “the condition of being vulnerable to others.” In 1883, Anna C. Morrison directed her attention in a way that made her vulnerable to, moved by, cared for, the plants around her. Through this noticing, which led to a new vulnerability, Anna became part of a multispecies community and built a different way to be at home.

Almost 150 years after Anna made her album, her care for her home helped me build my own home in the same place. One of the plants that Anna chose to save was a Trillium grandiflorum. While I hadn’t known that trilliums grow in Wisconsin, I knew them well from the Southern Appalachians. My cousin and I had stumbled onto dozens of trilliums on our hike in Tennessee earlier this year. Trilliums, to me, are the telltale sign of spring, color, and light poking through the leaf litter. Maybe Anna felt the same way. Maybe trilliums were there for Anna, too, when she needed them most.

Anna, like lots of my ancestors, lives for me in a space of wondering. We can’t know what she thought or why she spent her time pasting plants onto pages. We don’t know who else has looked at her herbarium, though we can notice its pages seem often-turned, with little tears and chips at the edges. From a small sticker, I can figure out we both have lived within traveling distance of Milwaukee and its booksellers. By way of wondering, I can know that Anna was curious about her environment, that she spent time outside and brought her attention to little things, crouching down close to the ground.

I know Anna knew a lot about her home, that whatever else was going on in her life, she found a little grounding in the land. I know Anna and I both care about dandelions and buttercups and bittercress. And thanks to Anna’s care, I know to look for the trilliums when spring comes to my new home.

In times of precarity, that other Anna, Anna Tsing, asks us to guide our attention to the arts of noticing. To me, noticing is the first step towards kinship. While we know only in the broadest terms what forms of precarity Anna was responding to—industrialization, colonialism, patriarchy—we know these forces directed her attention towards her plant kin, with whom she grew into a new home.

In my life, as I’ve navigated the death of my grandfather, stricken with Parkinson’s after years of handling pesticides; as we all grapple with global climate change driven by war and genocide; and as I made my way through my first Wisconsin winter, its own form of precarity, I am grateful for Anna’s attention. Through her noticing, I learn how to notice my new home. Through her care, I begin to form caring relationships of my own.

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Featured Image: The Fiery Gizzard trail in Tennessee leading through a field of trilliums in late March. Photo by author, 2023.

Ellie Kincaid is a PhD student in English Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are interested in queer ecologies and sustainable communities, inspired by a love of being queer, in community, and outside. They have a BA from Davidson College in North Carolina. Contact.