1840 – 1903) was a British botanist and writer known primarily for her popularizing botanical books, especially those on the ferns and grasses of Great Britain.
[2] In her early twenties, she published books for the general public on her botanical collecting trips, with titles beginning Rambles in Search of.... Plues was writing in an era when books popularizing science were taking off as a genre, and her work compares to that being done by such authors as Phoebe Lankester and Elizabeth and Mary Kirby.
[3] Plues later wrote more scientific volumes on British ferns and grasses that covered such topics as geographic distribution, structure, propagation and cultivation, and diseases.
In 1866, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and in the 1870s, she moved to London, where she was put in charge of a workhouse recently founded by Monsignor Thomas John Capel.
[2] She entered a convent, St Maur's, in Weybridge sometime after this,[2] where she rose to be the Superior General (the head, usually addressed as mother-superior).