The long-winded title page of Louisa Anne Meredith’s last volume, Bush Friends in Tasmania (1891), attests to her eclectic experience as a prose-writer, poet, botanist and illustrator. It reads:

This cv-like title page portrays Meredith as a prolific and accomplished author-artist. Judging from the title page, it seems that Meredith’s career was extensive and varied – covering flora and fauna, image and text, prose, poetry, drawing and painting, science and art, primer and travelogue. The inordinate number of commas and semi-colons protract her wide-ranging experience across various forms, genres and disciplines, while the triplet of &c. implies that a complete inventory of her accomplishments is impossible – or at the very least beyond the scope of the single folio page on which the title-page is printed. Such density of information prompts the question: where to begin? Or, how to read Meredith’s work?

Taking my cue from this variegated cv, I explore Meredith’s role as an avid anthologist, that is, a gatherer of posies both floral and poetic. Through a close reading of Meredith’s chapter on the Tasmanian laurel, I argue that Meredith’s practise of collecting and curating Australian flora is inextricably intertwined with her attempt to propagate a ‘home-grown’ colonial poetics and pitch herself as poet-laureate of Tasmania.

Read etymologically, the word anthology comes partly from the Greek words for flower (anthos) and collection (logia): literally, a gathering of flowers.¹ However, in a more metaphorical sense anthology can also refer to a collection of epigrams or poems.² By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, botanical metaphors were cropping up everywhere and ‘books of pressed plants […] and anthologies of poems began to stand in for one another, crisscrossing disciplinary boundaries’.³

With its bower-bird-like accumulation of flowers translated into names, descriptions, images and poems, Meredith’s Bush Friends typifies the cross-pollination between literature and botany that was so popular in eighteenth and nineteenth century anthologies.⁴ Meredith’s chapter on the Tasmanian laurel displays the multimedia formula of Bush Friends as a whole wherein each chapter presents a botanical illustration followed by a prose description of the plant/s and a poem.⁵ In the prose section of the chapter, Meredith elaborates on the provenance of the illustration and the inspiration for the poem which came to her in the form of a botanical specimen. The laurel-specimen in question, Meredith explains, was ‘brought to [her] very carefully, in a tin box’ by an ‘old and valued friend, the late Dr. Joseph Milligan, F.R.S., F.G.S., &c., &c.’ (13). With the image of the ‘tin box’ Meredith ties her artistic practice to the botanical culture of collecting. Moreover, Meredith’s anecdotal reference to her friendship with the surgeon-naturalist Joseph Milligan – secretary of the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land between 1848 and 1860 and fellow of the Linnaean Society from 1850⁶ –, signifies her connection to an expansive network of botanists in the colonies.⁷ Meredith’s work thus follows the logic of the anthology, intertwining art and science to create its floral conceit.

According to Meredith’s assessment, the so-called Tasmanian laurel is ‘well named Laurel’ (13), although she paradoxically proceeds to illustrate the ways in which the name does not quite work. Despite some superficial similarities, Meredith observes that ‘in fruit it bears no affinity to the European laurel’ (14). In response to the unexpected features of the Tasmanian laurel, Meredith must use similes and analogies to describe its flowers, ‘large as Apple blossoms, of a thick Camellia-like texture’ (14); its leaves, ‘somewhat resembling that of the Columbine’ (14); and its form, ‘a little in the manner of the Rhododendron’ (14). Each of these similes attempt to integrate the Tasmanian laurel into a system of associations familiar to Europeans.⁸ However, these comparisons are limited, as evinced by Meredith’s tentative use of the terms ‘somewhat’ and ‘a little’. In the oscillation between resemblance and difference Meredith prefigures the themes of incompleteness and insufficiency taken up in the poem that forms the third and final part of the chapter on the Tasmanian laurel.

For a poem titled ‘Incompleteness’ Meredith’s poem looks and sounds decidedly finished. The poem is arranged into five elegiac stanzas – quatrains in iambic pentametre, rhyming ABAB – displayed on a single page. The regular rhythm of the lines and consistent rhyme scheme give the poem an audible symmetry that presents the poem as a harmonious whole. Apart from a few instances of enjambment where the sense overflows into the next line, Meredith usually end-stops each line (and always each stanza) with a piece of punctuation. An exception is when the speaker invokes those ‘who wove / the fragrant Bay-leaves for the victor’s brow’ (lines 5-6), a reference to the ancient practise of crowning heroes and acclaimed poets with laurel wreaths.⁹ And as my head / Is always youthful, let the laurel always / Be green and shining!’ (Metamorphoses, line 59-66).] Here, the line-break after ‘wove’ draws a metaphorical connection between weaving and reading poetry whereby the lines of verse are the weft and the reader’s gaze is the shuttle moving back and forth across the page.¹⁰ On the whole, however, Meredith opts for grammatical closure and avoids loose ends. So, while the title of the poem suggests that the overarching theme is incompleteness, the poem itself aspires to completeness at least on the level of form.