Prison herbarium.

What could be more iconoclastic than a herbarium composed within four walls, without the scope of nature? Like a contradiction in terms. Rosa Luxemburg's prison herbarium is an archive without equal. Disturbing and captivating, its fragility and history make it a testimony of resistance and escape, a factory of forms and joy, a document on the political sentiment of nature, the foundation of all ecology.
Composed of seven notebooks dated from April 1915 to October 1918, the herbarium was made possible by the imprisoned revolutionary thanks to the unfailing friendship of a few women, her close friends, including the feminist Clara Zetkin. Beyond the few flowers and weeds from the prison courtyard that Rosa gathered when she was out under surveillance, it was her loved ones who sent her letters with dried specimens or bouquets of fresh flowers that she herself pressed. The plates of the herbarium thus respond to a whole correspondence where there is talk of botany, nature, German romanticism, love of all creatures, and this, "in spite of humanity." Rosa Luxemburg never ceased to encourage her loved ones to maintain their joy of life and their cheerfulness while the clouds she glimpsed through a barred window took on the colors of war and steel.
The Herbarium and the Nightingale consists of 133 botanical plates accompanied by translations of their handwritten captions. This work also contains some sixty letters, in which the revolutionary evokes her passion for plants, as well as for animals. Previously unpublished documents in French complete the volume, including a journal in which Rosa Luxemburg recorded the deeds and actions of her life as an inmate. This edition is completely original in its richness and has no equal in either German or Polish.