Frère Marie-Victorin is one of the seminal figures who, in the 1920s and 1930s, were instrumental in bringing French Canada into the modern era. A botanist, he was one of the first French Canadians to pursue a scientific career and to achieve, in that guise, a measure of international recognition. As a scientist and educator, he tirelessly urged upon his compatriots the need to make room for science in what had, up to then, been a largely humanistic education. Marie-Victorin, attracted from his early years to literature, was also a literary figure of some note, whose love for language informed all of his scientific writing. This was particularly true of his Flore laurentienne (Laurentian Flora, 1935), his most enduring work and one which strengthened the bonds French Canadians felt to the land settled by their forebears.

Marie-Victorin was born Conrad Kirouac in Kingsey Falls, Quebec, on 3 April...