Hot off the Press

“I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.” — Cathy in Wuthering Heights

England’s Yorkshire moorland can be a wild, windy, and wet place, but in late summer it bursts into a breathtaking sea of the purple heather that Cathy yearned for as she lay dying and pining for Heathcliff. A fragrant evergreen, heather is the subject of an important and beautiful series of monographs, The Heathery, by early 19th-Century botanist H.C. Andrews. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, all six volumes are now available to enjoy online.

Andrews was not just a botanist. He was also a talented artist who drew, colored, and engraved the illustrations for his works, and even published his books himself. The Heathery series, filled with his marvelously detailed color illustrations, was originally published between 1804 and 1812. It was so well regarded that a second edition, “corrected and enlarged,” was published in 1845; that is the edition at Project Gutenberg.

Several varieties of heather are native to the British Isles, the most common being ling or Scotch heather. But in The Heathery Andrews gives special attention to the many varieties in the genus Erica that had recently been imported to Britain from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Andrews mentions in his introduction to The Heathery that there were about 137 identified varieties. He notes, however, “This is certainly far short of the number at present cultivated in Britain; … we may fairly conjecture that the Genus is by no means bounded by the species we at present possess.” He was right: today there are over 850 identified species of Erica.

Andrews took a scientific approach in his monograph. Each description in The Heathery is presented in Latin and English. And, in his richly-colored illustrations, Andrews depicted not only the entire plant, but also its constituent parts, such as leaves and blossoms, in magnified form.

Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have contributed to Project Gutenberg several other botanical works written and illustrated by Andrews:

• Coloured Engravings of Heaths, published in four volumes from 1794-1830. Volumes 2 through 4 are available at Project Gutenberg; Volume 1 is in progress at Distributed Proofreaders.
• The Botanist’s Repository, a 10-volume work on “new and rare plants,” published from 1797-1812. Volumes 1 and 2 (combined in one volume) are available at Project Gutenberg; the remaining volumes are in progress at Distributed Proofreaders. Andrews’s father-in-law, John Kennedy, of the prominent Lee and Kennedy plant nursery, helped him with the descriptions of the plants.
• A lovely monograph on Roses, published from 1805-1828.

Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg are proud to have preserved, for the free use of anyone anywhere, these exquisite works of botany.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2023 at 12:01 am and is filed under Book Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.