Botanical Companions
ISBN: 9781587294525
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Botany; Botanists;

In her luminous inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987). Aven was a professor of botany at the University of Wyoming for many years; Ruth compiled field guides to Rocky Mountain plants and wrote articles on botany for magazines. The two met and married when Aven was in his seventies and Ruth was in her mid thirties, and they developed a symbiotic partnership that joined work and play, learning and companionship. Into this relatively straightforward reconstruction of two lives Knobloch blends the history of her own life as a scholar and an amateur naturalist, her own journal entries, and her letters written to Ruth to create a transformative environmental auto/biography.

Frieda Knobloch is an associate professor of American studies and women's studies, School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Wyoming in Laramie. She is the author of The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West .

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