Unusual for her time, Edith Clements (1874-1971) had a formal botanical education; she received a Ph.D. in botanical ecology from the University of Nebraska, and spent her life in various academic and research pursuits. Typically this was in conjunction with her husband, Frederic Clements (1874-1945), who was also a plant ecologist. Together, they published “Rocky Mountain Flowers” in 1914, a botanically detailed flora of the flowering plants including trees, but no conifers or ferns. This is not a field guide, but the watercolor illustrations by Edith Clements are exquisite, typically showing several plants from the same family together. On her own, she later published “Flowers of Mountain and Plain” (1926), a book for a more general audience using many of the same illustrations.
Willa Cather was a classmate of Frederic and a good friend of Edith and it’s likely their scientific knowledge influenced the environmental aspects of the novelist’s writing. In an interview by Eleanor Hinman in the “Lincoln Sunday Star (November 6, 1921), Cather expressed her love of Nebraska wild flowers, concluding, “There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels. That is the Clements botany dealing with the wild flowers of the west.”
Excerpted from the Winter 2020 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin