Pratt was educated at Eastgate House, Rochester, and introduced to botany - considered a suitable field for women[2] - by Dr. Dods, a family friend.

[4] Pratt first rose to prominence with Wild Flowers of the Year, published in 1852–1853, which was dedicated to Queen Victoria with the monarch's permission.

From her first book, Flowers and Their Associations, her works sold well, but she did not ever achieve critical acclaim as a consequence of a bourgeois disdain for the autodidactic woman.

[5] Pratt's magnum opus is The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain and Their Allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails, a six-volume project assessing more than 1500 species, with 300 illustrations, that was published over a decade, between 1855 and 1873.

The illustrations used a form of chromolithography, the Baxter method, a commercial technique used create affordable coloured images to allow her work a broader readership.