An important work both historically and aesthetically. Anna Atkins, an aristocratic Victorian amateur botanist, was encouraged by the inventor of the positive-negative photographic process, William Henry Fox Talbot, to pursue her study of photography. Her resultant proficiency in the cyanotype process and her love of plants produced a unique and sensitive body of botanical impressions. Larry Schaaf puts the work in an historical context and gives us details of photography's first woman practitioner.