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582 pages Summary: The story of Alma Whittaker, who was born in 1800 in the Age of Enlightenment, and lived well into the period of the Industrial Revolution, bearing witness to the extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Alma inherits the money and brilliant mind of her father, Henry Whittaker, a wealthy, bold and charismatic botanical explorer, and becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. When she falls in love with Ambrose Pike, a painter of orchids, she is drawn into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical, despite her clear-mindedness. The pair share a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life