The care with which these artists track the relation between illustration and matter insists on the botanical difference that Elizabeth Grosz, following Deleuze, identifies with Charles Darwin, but which has a much earlier, and eccentric history among Romantic-era women who botanized just at, and then just beyond, the edge of acceptable behavior in ways that argue for a version of empiricism that requires thinking with matter and with forms that are attentive to matter.
The European expansion and the transatlantic contacts created a situation where natural historians of several nationalities botanized in the colonies, each giving the plants they 'discovered' a different name.