![]() ![]() ![]() This education and her interest in botany lead Alma to embark on what will become her life’s work, the study of moss. Henry and his Dutch wife, Beatrice, settle in a lavish estate in Philadelphia, where Alma grows up surrounded not just by the finest greenhouses and botanical library in the country but also by fierce intellectual debate.Ī strapping girl who is made painfully aware at an early age that she isn’t beautiful, Alma is given a rigorous education by her mother. It begins with her birth, in 1800, before looping back to tell the story of her father, Henry, a gardener's son who grows up to travel the world with Captain Cook and eventually makes a vast fortune as a botanical importer. The Signature of All Things traces Alma's long life from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the modern world. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the centre of the boulder, where are all the water pooled.” Here were rich abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. “This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. ![]() But when Alma Whittaker, the heroine of Elizabeth Gilbert’s magnificent new novel, examines a mossy stone, she sees a whole new world. ![]() What do you see when you look at a boulder covered in moss? For most of us the answer is not much. ![]()
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