In 2014, I published a novel about a perfumer-herbalist (The Lake). Shortly after, I wanted to create a sort of herbarium describing my favorite flowers and scents. I spoke to some friends about it, then put the idea away in a little corner of my head and wrote Gens du Nord, my third novel.Then I left Montreal for the Gaspé peninsula: Gespeg  ('the end of the land’ in mi’gmaq language), Quebec's Finistère. This new life a thousand kilometers from my home town, between the sea and the forest, deepened my sensitivity and changed my relationship with nature forever. I revived the idea of a herbarium in 2022 and reworked it to give the project an original direction. I wanted to make a special, intimate book that would present my everyday allies in an oblique ways that could speak to other sensibilities. I wrote in 2022-2023 the first draft of this idea and made with an illustrator, Geneviève Godbout, a private edition of the project. Then, in 2025, the book came out with the full text, without illustrations, at Marchand de feuilles in Québec, to be published in France (Castor Astral) and in English (Greystone) in 2027.

A memoir, a self-portrait, and a grimoire without  fiction, Petite nature presents and showcases what I call my "everyday allies". These allies are places (even an era), plants (flowers, trees, herbs, weeds), gemstones, artistic practices, colors, animals, an attitude, powerful watercourses, some foods, that once calmed my little nature or that still keep me on the shore.

Perrine Leblanc

Published in Québec by Marchand de feuilles in 2025.

Rights sold by the author : France (Le Castor Astral publisher), English World.

Press clippings in french.