The Signature of All Things traces Alma’s long life from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the modern world. It begins with her birth, in 1800, before looping back to tell the story of her father, Henry, a gardener’s son who grows up to travel the world with Captain Cook and eventually makes a vast fortune as a botanical importer. Henry and his Dutch wife, Beatrice, settle in a lavish estate in Philadelphia, where Alma grows up surrounded not just by the finest greenhouses and botanical library in the country but also by fierce intellectual debate.