"Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson's and Henry David Thoreau's collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that...

"Poet and novelist Helen Humphreys's And a Dog Called Fig, a meditation on the benefits of dogs to the creative life, including the dogs of well-known writers from history, portraits of all the dogs from the author's life, and the arrival and raising of her new puppy"--