Wildflower

Basing her story on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale of Thumbelina, Nova Scotian Scott has set her little heroine at the centre of a lush and clearly Maritime landscape.

A young woman who lives “in a house on a hillside that looks over the sea” longs for a child with whom she can share her walks among the wildflowers. In standard fairy tale fashion, a witch gives the woman a seed that grows into a baby tiny enough to sleep in a walnut shell. The child matures but never becomes much bigger than her mother’s hand.

As time passes, the girl becomes restless.

With spring came the birds

Singing sweet songs in twos

The girl longed to be with them

As they passed into view.

She wanted to dance in the wind

Like a wildflower.

Wildflower leaves home and follows her dream of travelling, reveling in nature, and sleeping under the stars. She is saved from the winter’s cold by a friendly mole and his mouse friend who shelter her in their cave. She works in exchange for her lodging.

She helped them keep

Their dark little cave

She sang and read

For the home they gave.

She cooked nice things.

She served them tea

Complications arise when Mole professes his love for Wildflower and offers her a ring. She explains that she will need to depart in spring to follow her wanderlust, but Mole takes the rejection badly and locks the cave’s door. Wildflower cries for release, trying to keep her spirits up by humming.

Her song turned to hope

Like a ladder it climbed

It tore through the earth

It grew like a vine.

Then, some quick taps –

And the song of a bird!

Wildflower gasped

Guess who had heard?

A friendly swallow has traced the tunnel of light Wildflower’s music has made out from the cave and into the air. The bird flies her back to her mother who is happy to see her girl but has become aware of her restless nature.

“I love you, sweet flower.

But you must be free.

I made you these wings

So you can come home to me.”

Stretching out her new crimson butterfly wings, Wildflower takes flight along with the swallow.

The plotline is pleasant enough if not highly original. Aside from some bumps in the rhyme scheme, I had some trouble with inconsistencies in the line breaks and punctuation. But the repetition of the hanging lines that include the word “wildflower” after many of the quatrains adds some interest to the rhythm.

Scott’s preferred media of gouache and watercolour are used here as in previous works, The Book of Selkie (www.cmreviews.ca/node/1911) and She Dreams of Sable Island. (www.cmreviews.ca/node/1762). The strongest aspect of the richly textured illustrations is the rendering of Nova Scotia plant life. Petals and leaves are carefully observed, and, because of the proportional differences between Wildflower and the animals that save her and those plants, the detail in the flowers and grasses really stands out. The opening image of the house on a hill, which is actually a cliff standing above a pounding sea, with delicate flora in the foreground and that of the swallow that saves the girl at the end, is particularly striking.