Yan Wang Preston — With Love. From an Invader: Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me

A year spent with one heart-shaped rhododendron in Lancashire, and a look at what it means to call a plant an invader.

On alternate days between 17 March 2020 and 16 March 2021, Yan Wang Preston went back to a single Rhododendron ponticum bush in Burnley to photograph it. Motion-triggered infrared cameras caught more than 20 species of animal there, a sound recorder picked up over 45 species of bird, and across the seasons she gathered fallen leaves, seed capsules, aborted buds and spent flowers from a second shrub.

Once prized in the Victorian enthusiasm for rhododendrons, R. ponticum is now treated as an invasive species. Wang Preston, a Chinese British artist who came to Britain from Beijing at twenty, sets that judgement against her own life as a migrant and argues that the bush sustains local wildlife rather than threatening it.

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh co-published the book and contributed two sets of historical images from its archive. Wang Preston writes one of the essays; the others are by Bergit Arends, Matthew Gandy, Emma Nicolson, Alan Elliott, Michael Pritchard, Monty Adkins and Liam Devlin. There is also a poem by Kate Kinoshita and an interview with Cosima Towneley. Carel Fransen designed it.

The Eriskay Connection, 2025. 320 pages, softcover with tabs, 17 x 24 cm.