While sorting through books to display in their new library in 2021, staff at the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society stumbled upon a unique treasure: a five-volume set of Sir James Edward Smith’s The English Flora, circa 1830, annotated with botanical drawings, marginalia, and pressings of gentian, willowherb, and kidney vetch. The books’ notes, including an illustration by the midwife George Spratt of a woman made entirely of flowers, suggested their owner had more than a casual interest in botany, but only the scrawled epithets “La Botaniste Miss Allen” and another mention of an Isabella Anne Allen hinted at who they may have belonged to.
“We just wanted to know a little bit more about her,” says Fiona Davison, the head of libraries and exhibitions at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) who oversaw an attempt to identify La Botaniste based on these scant clues. Allen, like many women botanists of her ...
