On Friday the Botanic gardens were drying in the sun, still shaking off the biblical floods of the day before. Paths were slippery with mud, too slippery in places to hold your footing and the steps, which I’d watched being constructed earlier in the year, had been mostly washed away. It being a whole month since I’d visited the gardens they seemed remarkably lush and densely planted, perhaps not surprising given June’s rainfall. Most remarkable of all for me was the gunnera: creating as it did, a world and scale all of its own.
Camera in hand, peering into this canopied realm, I quite unexpectedly found myself shrinking inside the pages of Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies, standing with a stalk of gunnera at my side.
When I was growing up I had two of these beautifully illustrated books. I don’t remember how I came by them. I like to think they were a gift from my grandmother. They were among the few books I owned (most coming from the Library), and I spent much time inside these happy pages in flights of imagination – to me they were a thing of beauty. I loved the idyll and the fantasy: the way they represented the natural world – flowers I knew, flowers I had yet to meet – but above all it was the colour and its delicate combinations that captivated and sang out to me.
My favourite? A close call between, bugle, fumitory and chicory. Which was yours? Take a look here for a reminder
I remember the flower fairy books.. It was a privilege to read them when young, when the world it showed seemed a possible reality.
Gunnera seem to me to be large, Doctor Who – ish, prehistoric, like magnificent dinosaaurs. Th leaves seem everything. The flowers very little, brave things. wx