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Grafting is both the subject and the method of our chapter. As Rebecca Bushnell observes, grafting was a “common metaphor” used to explain “conjunctions of disparate things” in early modern England. In its more positive valence, grafting “impl[ied] the indissoluble marriage of what had been separate or alien.”1 Yet early modern gardening manuals also insisted that grafting worked best if there was a measure of similarity between the plants selected for the procedure.2 Such conditions for good grafting capture the dynamics of our collaboration. We approach the same moment in the same literary text—the inscription of two poems into a tree in Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621)—from diverse perspectives: the material practices of arboriculture and the history of the book. In conjoining these areas of expertise, we aim to show their fruitful convergence at the bark. Not only were early modern gardeners instructed to regard bark as a surface fit to receive the alphabetic “letters” made with sharp-edged tools but this integument also comprised and encased the early modern codex, whose etymological roots we trace back to the tree’s trunk. We graft, then, to illuminate the rich poetic contents of the tree-book in Wroth’s romance and to demonstrate how the conditions of its production both articulate and complicate scholarly approaches to early modern ecofeminism.KeywordsNatural WorldSecret MessageTree BarkEarly Modern PeriodParadise LostThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.