Page 49 - Hmmm M the Humdinger Flipbook for HARP Sept 27 2020

My gratitude to countless family and friends who contributed

their bounty of flowers, moss and mycelium, leaves and

evergreens, for the illustrations. In the early 1980s, my mother, as

was her custom, enclosed with her handwritten letter the pressed

columbine that appears on the front cover.

The Valley of the Big Stone and the surrounding plants that

feature in the setting for the Wise Woman may strike a chord

with students of Canadian women’s history, children’s literature

and Canadian wildflowers. I am an admirer of author and

botanist Catharine Parr Traill and her 1852 children’s story Lost

in the Backwoods (later re-named Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of

the Rice Lake Plains) held me in its grip from an early age. I