SOURCE: Hoyer, Mark T. “Cultivating Desire, Tending Piety: Botanical Discourse in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, pp. 111-25. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

In the following essay, Hoyer argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing is a good example of how women writers adapted male-dominated discussions about science and nature to their own purposes.

In 1858 the preeminent American botanist Asa Gray opened his book Botany for Young People and Common Schools by quoting Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (1). Gray explains this verse as Christ's mandate to study the plants and, in so doing, to examine God's plan for humans. Later in the same volume, in describing flowers, Gray elucidates part of that plan: “The object of the flower is the production of seed. The...