PREORDER ~ The Complete Book of Flower Fairies ~ Cicely Mary Barker

PREORDER ~ The Complete Book of Flower Fairies ~ Cicely Mary Barker

Arriving early November, please preorder now to secure your copy.

A beautiful book for anyone who loves flowers, gardens, fairies, poetry, nature and a little bit of magic.

I absolutely adore this book. It is the kind of book you can pick up simply to wander through its pages, pausing over the exquisite botanical illustrations, whimsical little fairies and charming poems. It feels like stepping into a secret garden where every flower has a personality and every leaf might be hiding a tiny winged creature.

The Complete Book of the Flower Fairies brings together the much-loved poems and illustrations from Cicely Mary Barker’s classic Flower Fairies books, originally published from 1923 onwards. It includes the flowers and plants she so beautifully brought to life, along with their fairies, poems and a selection of fairy rhymes.

What makes Barker’s work particularly special is the extraordinary care she took to get the natural world right.

Cicely Mary Barker was determined that her flowers should be botanically accurate. She carefully studied real plants and worked with the botanists at Kew Gardens to ensure that the flowers she painted were true to life, down to their individual characteristics and details. Her fairies may have belonged to an enchanted world, but the plants beneath their tiny feet were very much real.

And the little faces of the fairies were real too.

Barker’s sister ran a kindergarten, and Cicely would sketch the children there, using their innocent expressions and natural poses as inspiration for her fairies. This is part of what gives them such a wonderfully unselfconscious quality. They don't look like polished, grown-up versions of fairies. They look like real children who have wandered barefoot into the garden and somehow grown wings.

Born in 1895 in Croydon, England, Barker was largely educated at home because of ill health and taught herself to draw and paint from an early age. Remarkably, she had her first artwork published when she was just sixteen. Inspired by nature and by the Pre-Raphaelite artists she admired, she devoted her life to painting, eventually creating the Flower Fairies that would become her most beloved work.

Nearly a century after the first Flower Fairy book appeared, her delicate illustrations still have a wonderful ability to make us look more closely at the plants growing around us.

A truly enchanting addition to a garden lover's bookshelf, a beautiful gift for anyone who loves flowers, fairies, poetry or botanical illustration, and a book to treasure whether you're eight or eighty.

A little piece of botanical magic to dip into again and again.

Pair it with my Grassroots Herbalism guide or Herbal Astrology Oracle for a beautiful botanical-inspired collection celebrating plants, folklore, herbal wisdom and the magic of the natural world.