Sonia's Book by Bridget Penney

Bridget Penney

Ma Bibliotheque, ISBN 9781738507931,
Pb, 108 pgs, 11 x 17cm
Acqn. 36621
Awaiting stock


£12.00
Sonia Campbell Penney was a professional gardener, keen botanist, and the author's aunt. Her 'book' is a copy of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands by F. Fraser Darling, interleaved with eleven sheets of plant specimens, guarded by blotting paper, which Sonia collected around Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands in May 1961. Functionally, if sporadically, annotated with plant names and, occasionally, places of finding, these sheets might be interpreted as a form of nature writing or a holiday diary almost without words. Sixty years on, Bridget Penney asks what a close, though thoroughly unscientific, consideration of these unmediated traces might reveal.