Every other day for a year, Yan Wang Preston (CN/GB) walked to a particular love-heart-shaped Rhododendron ponticum bush on the outskirts of Burnley, Lancashire, UK, and photographed it. That repeated ritual walk is the spine of *With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me*, a 320-page field study published by The Eriskay Connection in 2025. Alongside the camera, she used infrared motion-sensitive cameras and a sound recorder; these recorded more than 20 different animal species and over 45 different bird species, extending the book past the single plant into a working ecology.

A second, smaller rhododendron shrub became the object of more hands-on interaction. Preston collected its fallen leaves in autumn, its seed capsules and aborted flower buds in winter, and its fading flowers in spring and summer. This process of collecting led to a complementary series, *Autumn Winter Spring Summer*. The rhododendrons at the centre of the project are a legacy of a nineteenth-century local hunting estate, where the plants were grown to provide cover for game. British rhododendrons are all introduced plants, brought from southern Europe and East Asia for science and horticulture. Once the subject of the Victorian “rhodo-craze”, the ponticum variety is now frequently labelled non-native invasive in conservation management and targeted for removal. Preston, a migrant to the United Kingdom, treats this contested perception as a question about who defines a national landscape and in whose favour.

The book is edited by Yan Wang Preston, Emma Nicolson and Alan Elliott. Its eight essays are by Nicolson, Elliott, Bergit Arends, Matthew Gandy, Monty Adkins, Michael Pritchard, Liam Devlin and Wang Preston herself, alongside an interview with Cosima Towneley and a poem by Kate Kinoshita. Two historical image collections from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a co-publisher, give the contemporary fieldwork a documentary counterweight. Carel Fransen designed the book, and it is published in a first edition of 1,250 copies. The first 183 books include a free numbered and signed postcard.

For collectors drawn to photographic books that operate as research, this is a considered example: a long durational method, an interdisciplinary apparatus, and a subject that refuses the familiar native/non-native binary.