Beloved Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr (1871-1945) was born in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied art in the US, England and France until 1911, when she moved back to British Columbia. Carr was most heavily influenced by the landscapes and First Nations cultures of British Columbia and Alaska. In the 1920s she came into contact with members of the Group of Seven and was later invited to submit her works for inclusion in a Group of Seven exhibition. They named her 'The Mother of Modern Arts' about five years later.
Emily Henrietta Woods (1852-1916) came to Victoria from Ireland in 1865. Her talent for art gained her employment as a drawing teacher, and Emily Carr was one of her students. But her life's work was the creation of over 200 life-size watercolours of wild flowers, some of which appear in this book.