With Love. From an Invader. celebrates the life and resilience of the rhododendron. The book creates space to contemplate the intimacy, beauty, and strength of nature, and the eternity of time within an ecological and political framework. It is a love letter from a non-native species to the cosmopolitan ecology of contemporary Britain. It is also a love letter to the British land from its non-native inhabitants who make it a home for its multicultural residents, both human and non-human.

With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me is an intensive field study. Every other day for a year, Yan Wang Preston (CN/GB) went to a particular love-heart-shaped Rhododendron ponticum bush and photographed it. She also collected another smaller rhododendron shrub’s autumn leaves, seed capsules, aborted flower buds and fading flowers before making a series of artwork with them. In this process she discovered a thriving ecology with the non-native rhododendrons as the keystone species. She also gained an embodied understanding of her rooted position as a migrant in the UK.

With Love. From an Invader. – YAN WANG PRESTON