BRAMBLY HEDGE BLOG Archives - Brambly Hedge - Children's books and gifts

Late Spring and The Chelsea Flower Show 2026 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:25:26 +0000

Over the past couple of years we have been leafing through the Brambly Hedge archives and working with the City of London Corporation to find out more about Jill Barklem’s love of Epping Forest. Epping Forest is a vital green corridor that stretches from the rural Essex countryside right into urban London. It’s a place Jill spent a lot of time sketching and taking photos, many of which were used as inspiration for the Brambly Hedge books. A couple of years ago we matched up notes, sketches, and photos from the archive to confirm that we had rediscovered a very special tree, the original Hornbeam tree that Jill used to create the home of the Toadflax family in her illustrations. In April 2026 we went back to Epping Forest for another successful discovery… Crabapple Cottage!

This Crabapple tree is home to Mr and Mrs Apple and is one of Jill’s most recognisable illustrations; the cross-section of Crabapple Cottage in full blossom from Spring Story. We once again used photos, notes, and sketches from the archive to track the tree down, which is only a short distance from Jill’s home at the time she was creating Spring Story. The tree is over 300 years old and still thriving as it was in full blossom in early April this year.

For those who want to find out more about Crabapple Cottage and Jill’s research for Brambly Hedge, there is currently a display in the Epping Forest Visitor Centre at Chingford that willbe in place until September 2026.

From northeast of London we head across the city, where preparations are in full swing for the 2026 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, one of the most celebrated horticultural events of the year.

Jill Barklem was fascinated by botany and the natural world, she became an expert on wild flowers and spent many hours photographing every petal and illustrating every minute detail in her sketchbooks, much of this research came to fruition on the pages of her Brambly Hedge books.

She would visit the RHS Chelsea Flower show whenever she could, it was one the highlights of her year, and if she couldn’t make it in person she would be glued to the BBC watching every episode. It’s one of the many reasons that May was her favourite month of the year.

Unsurprisingly, she would always prefer the show gardens that looked as though they had been plucked straight from the natural landscape in which they belong. For her that would always be the natural wonder of the hedgerow.

On this theme, we arrive at the 2026 Show where we have teamed up with the incredibly talented Mille Richardson and Stokesay Flowers to bring Jill’s hedgerow to the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘A visit to Brambly Hedge’ will adorn the Bull Ring gate entrance to the show, which is located on the river Thames embankment in Chelsea.

The installation highlights the importance of our hedgerows to biodiversity within our landscape in the UK and beyond. Since the 1940s the UK has lost nearly 50% of its hedgerows, a vital habitat for many species.

The installation also pays homage to Jill as both a storyteller and an artist. It will flow across the gate in a journey from spring through to summer with an abundance of fresh, seasonal, British-grown flowers from Stokesay’s traditional walled garden in south Shropshire. The wild hedgerow foliage that intertwines the installation will be from the Badminton estate in Gloucestershire.

Violets, cowslips and forget-me-nots emerge from the hedgerow, evoking the warm days when the mice step out to welcome spring. As summer unfolds, honeysuckle and wild roses, including rambler Rosa ‘François Juranville’ and English garden rose ‘Emily Brontë’, fill the air with sweetness, and thoughts turn to a very special occasion…

Head through the Bull Ring gate into the Great Pavillion where you will find a further installation celebrating Poppy and Dusty’s wedding!

There will also be a Brambly Hedge window installation on display at Waterstones bookshop on the King’s Road. They will have plenty of stock of our latest books including A Visit to Brambly Hedge and our new board books House for a Mouse and Nice For Mice, as well as lots of items from our stationery and homeware range.

Following the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, we can now announce that we will also be attending the first ever RHS Badminton Flower Show, from the 8th to the 12th July 2026. As mentioned, some of the foliage used in the Bull Ring Gate installation comes from the Badminton estate, so it seems fitting that we head back to the Gloucestershire to continue our horticultural celebration into the summer. We wanted to make sure that our installations are as sustainable as possible, therefore many of the plants and trees used at the Chelsea Flower Show will be reused to create new installations for the RHS Badminton Show, and will then go on to find permanent homes after the summer 2026 RHS shows.

We will be working with Millie Richardson Flowers to decorate the RHS letters at the Badminton Show, where there will also be a children’s activity area and a Brambly Hedge shop.

We hope you enjoy the installations over the coming weeks! For those of you who are unable to make it to RHS Chelsea or Badminton Flower Show…. don’t worry, there will be plenty of photos and film on our socials, there is also a dedicated page on of website here.

It’s been an incredibly chilly May so far (currently sideways hail outside the window), so hopefully some warm summer sunshine is on the way!?

Pete Barklem
Mid–May 2026
England

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Spring 2026 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:42:15 +0000

It only seems like yesterday that I was signing off the Winter blog when we were celebrating the opening of the Winter festivities at National Trust Petworth House in West Sussex, which had a wonderful response from those who attended. Winter has passed, and spring is in full swing, we already have some new Brambly Hedge themed events open to the public, with more to follow, it’s shaping up to be a busy year for the mice (and us)!

In the middle of March the mice returned to Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset, it’s their third year in a row taking residence on the beautiful Dorset coast. We visited the site on a rare sunny day (it has been a very wet and cloudy start to the year here in the UK) and the team have once again created a fantastic Trail. This year’s theme is The High Hills and Sea Story,there’s a new activity book to fill with stamps and answer questions as you explore the site. From the rolling Dorset hills you can follow the winding stream towards the sea, once past the Weaver’s Cottage illustration, head down past the moving water wheel, you will find a climbing station, where you can stop in and visit Wilfred’s rocky cave. Then head down to the sea, looking for the mice along the way and collecting stamps in your booklet. Down on the water’s edge you will find that the Periwinkle boat has returned, alongside a brand new bird watching hide, a perfect place to stop and watch the world go by, we could quite happily have sat there all day watching the birds pottering around in the shallows. The Abbotsbury Trail will be open until late October 2026 and their onsite shop has just been restocked with many of our newly released items.

From Dorset we head north east and back to Epping Forest, where the Brambly Hedge story began, and the location of the wooden sculpture Trail which opened last year. This spring we are launching a Brambly Hedge display at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre in Chingford, we have taken over the gallery on the ground floor to give you a behind the scenes look at how Jill Barklem crafted her illustrations. The new display includes unseen pressed flowers from Jill’s early research trips into the forest, pencil and pen sketches from her studio, paint tests, photographs, and a glimpse into how her illustrations were created. There are also display cabinets featuring many items from her studio.

One of Jill’s most recognisable illustrations is featured in the gallery as never before… on the wall you will find the largest ever print produced of Jill’s Crabapple Cottage cross-section illustration from Spring Story created by our new partner, Stickerscape. It is quite incredible to see this illustration in such detail, every jam jar on the shelf, every blossom petal and stamen, every bristle of her paint brush can all be seen in fascinating detail.

We also have further exciting news of a discovery related to Crabapple Cottage… more on this on our socials in April. The Brambly Hedge display will be at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre in Chingford until September 2026, it is free to visit and tickets are not required.

From Epping Forest we head north west up to Stokesay Court in Shropshire for a meeting (which included tea and lots of delicious cake!) in the stunning walled gardens for a very exciting project that will come to fruition in May… at the 2026 RHS Chelsea Flower Show!

Following on from the Winter Story themed display at the Garden Museum in London (mentioned in our winter Blog), we are very pleased to be working with Millie Richardson Flowers to produce an installation inspired by Spring and Summer Story, celebrating hedgerows and seasonal English garden flowers. The flowers for the installation will be sustainably sourced and kindly supplied by the wonderful team at Stokesay Flowers. We met with the team working on the project to delve into the Brambly Hedge archives for inspiration for flowers to use in May. Jill kept notes of all the flowers and foliage used in her illustrations… a very useful guide for this project! We are all very excited, and will be sure to share more details on our socials and in an additional Chelsea blog in May.

May is set to be a busy month this year, as well as the Chelsea Flower Show, we also have two board books publishing! We’ve had many requests for a simplified Brambly Hedge book for our younger readers. These two are perfect for toddlers, featuring rhyming stories and made from durable materials that should withstand all that early life can throw at them… and all in life that the books are thrown at! House for Mouse is a gentle rhyming story through the Brambly Hedge home… “The kitchen is where we stir and bake, eat blackberry pie, and hazelnut cake”. Nice For Mice is a rhyming jaunt through the favourite things the Brambly Hedge mice like to do, “It’s nice for mice to splash in the sea and to play on the sand till it’s time for tea”. Both board books are available to pre order now and will publish in the UK on the 7^th May 2026. They will both be available in the USA in early 2027. We hope to also have these available in other languages soon!

We’ve been expanding our translated range of books. Poppy’s Babies has just published in French with our partners at Qilinn. The Dutch editions are rolling out, with Spring Story just published and Summer Story on the way. The Nature Colouring Book will soon be heading to Japan, and the Festive Colouring Book will be arriving in Spanish and Catalan later in the year.

One of the most frequent requests that arrive at Brambly Hedge HQ is for more audiobook options. We currently have audiobooks available via Audible and Apple, we even have a CD for A Year in Brambly Hedge! By far the most requested item is Yoto cards! We are pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Yoto to produce our first Brambly Hedge Yoto cards, and they are available now. The two card set features A Year in Brambly Hedge and Adventures in Brambly Hedge, all eight Brambly Hedge books. There are even little Yoto pixel versions of the mice that appear on the screen as you listen!

Over in our shop we have taken delivery of many, many new items this spring. It’s the perfect time of year to take stock of our new Spring Picnic range that has launched over the last eight months, which now includes tea towels, a travel mug, an insulated drinks bottle, a glasses case, paper napkins, an apron, and oven gloves! In the last couple of weeks we have also added a new picnic bookmark, stitched notebook, A5 bound notebook, and a magnetic memo pad for the fridge door.

This spring also sees the launch of the new Birthday Party pattern with Museums & Galleries, featuring a celebration of illustrations from Wilfred’s Birthday in Spring Story and illustrations from Poppy’s Babies. Currently we have two gift bags, wrapping paper, and tissue wrapping paper available, but more will follow.

We also now have a crystal paperweight available, perfect for keeping paperwork safe if you have a particularly gusty workplace. Our new paperweight features the Wilfred Reading illustration from the High Hills… which now also makes an appearance in our greetings and birthday card range, along with a new Waterstones exclusive Mother’s Day card.

2026 marks the 40^th anniversary of The High Hills, in this mountain adventure, Wilfred heads up to the rocky crags in search of ‘gold’. We’ll be celebrating the High Hills later this year in our Autumn blog.

Our partners at Stickerscape have produced a whole range of wonderful Brambly Hedge wall and window stickers! Perfect for themed and seasonal nursery, playroom, and bedroom walls, these stickers can be applied and removed without leaving marks and can be kept safely in their packaging for re-use at a later date. This means that the primroses and forget-me-not flowers of spring can be replaced with falling leaves and blackberries in autumn and holly and snowflakes for winter…. keeping your room seasonal all year. For more information on our wall and window stickers head over to our shop.

There is probably much more that I have forgotten to include here, but I’m out of time! There will be a special bonus Chelsea Flower Show themed blog in May… in the meantime have wonderful spring!

Pete Barklem Late March 2026 England

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Winter 2025 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:18:52 +0000

Midwinter is here and we are drawing to a close on our 45^th anniversary year. Late autumn and early winter has been very wet and mild, but we take solace at the solstice, safe in the knowledge that the light will start to return.

This festive season has been extra special for us as we have been celebrating the darkest days of the year in beautiful West Sussex. The Brambly Hedge mice have been making an appearance at National Trust Petworth House as a part of their Christmas enchantment event. The lovely team at Petworth have been busy all autumn creating a wonderful display, filling the grand 17^th century house with lights, trees, and little mice. The team have crafted a huge Brambly Hedge themed cutaway tree that features rooms inspired by The Secret Staircase and Winter Story. It was wonderful to see the joy and delight on children’s (and adults!) faces as they enter the room, and to hear stories reminiscing about the books.

Elsewhere in the house Mrs Apple can be found in the vast kitchens overseeing a table filled with a festive feast. Mr Apple has been helping out in the Stores arranging the jars of preserves and pickles. In a scene that could be straight from the Old Oak Palace… the Midwinter poem is on display at the entrance to the state dining room, a room full of exquisitely carved wood and paintings by the likes of JMW Turner and Van Dyke. In the corner of the North Gallery there is even a reading area featuring all of the Brambly Hedge books. A huge thank you to the whole team at Petworth House and the National Trust for making the start to the festive season so magical. The mice will be in residence until the 4^th January 2026.

From West Sussex we head up to London for more festivities. We were delighted to see the most beautiful interpretation of the Ice Hall from Winter Story recreated in dried flowers by florist Millie Richardson as a part of Winter Flowers Week at the Garden Museum in Lambeth. It was joyous scene to behold!

If you have been counting down the days to the festivities this year, then we hope you managed to get hold of our first ever Advent Calendar! The main Calendar image features a scene from the Old Oak Palace, with little glimpses of Brambly Hedge festivities behind each door. These had sold out, but we managed to get hold of a few more just in time!

On this theme… The Secret Staircase has completely sold out in most stores! Sorry for any disappointment caused, another print run is being rushed through, but copies are not expected to arrive until late January 2026 at the earliest. We have a couple of copies left in our store (at the time of writing), but hurry if you want one!

We’ve had a wonderful reaction to the new A Visit Brambly Hedge. This behind the scenes, seasonal journey through the Brambly Hedge year has inspired many of you to get in contact and reminisce about Jill’s work, thank you for all your kind words!

It’s been a bumper year for the fruit harvest here in the UK, and also for our range of Brambly Hedge items. We have just launched our first insulated Water Bottle, perfect for keeping your tea hot on frosty winter walks and your elderflower ice cool at summer picnics. Keeping with the drinks theme, we also now have a new Travel Mug available so you can take your acorn coffee with you on your commute from Crabapple Cottage down to the Store Stump.

It’s been another wonderful year for getting out and about with the mice. The new Epping Forest Wooden Sculpture Trail officially opened in the autumn, it’s been wonderful to see all your photos from your searches for all 17 sculptures around the Forest.

Down in Dorset we had a Summer Story themed trail along the stream and down to the sea at Abbotsbury Swannery. And what a summer it was, many days of warm sunshine meant that lots of you visited and filled your activity book with stamps. More Trails are on the way next year!

As our 45th anniversary year comes to an end, we look ahead to 2026. We still have a few diaries available to keep you organised and calendars to keep your wall seasonal throughout the year.

Our diaries are starting to fill up very quickly already indeed, there’s plenty on the way from us in 2026, including new Board Books, a new Spring range of products, wall and window decorations, more news from Epping Forest, and the mice will be visiting another National Trust property! Keep an eye on this space and our socials for more news.

In the meantime, from us all, we wish you a warm and peaceful winter season.

Pete Barklem
Mid December, 2025
England

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Autumn 2025 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:31:38 +0000

Where better to begin our autumn update than in an ancient woodland. The trees around us are full of colour and the leaves are drifting to the floor. It has been a very dry summer here in England, this seems to have enhanced the vivid reds and mustard yellows in the leaves as the trees shut down for winter hibernation. Specifically, we’re in Epping Forest, a vast swathe of woodland that runs from north east London out to the Essex countryside. Within the forest there are over 55,000 ancient trees of many varieties, it’s a vital habitat and a very important green space for London. Regular readers will know that Epping Forest was a huge inspiration for Jill Barklem and was key in the creation of the Brambly Hedge books. Now the mice have returned to the Forest forty-five years later… the Epping Forest Brambly Hedge Sculpture Trail is now officially open!

Back in February this year the Duke of Gloucester opened a new pathway though the Forest, a couple of the Brambly Hedge wooden mice were in attendance, but more have since been added, there are now seventeen in total to find. It was wonderful to have an October gathering in the Forest with many of the people who helped bring the Trail to fruition, especially those from the City of London Corporation and Epping Forest District Council, both of whom were pivotal in making the Trail happen.

The Trail runs from the Epping Forest Visitor Centre at Chingford (just 25 minutes by train from London Liverpool Street Station) through the Forest to Connaught Water, where the path continues around the lake. For a small fee you can pick up a Trail map and Brambly Hedge pencil from the Visitor Centre, the leaflet includes a tick list for all seventeen of the wooden sculptures, when you have ticked off all the mice, you can pick up a sticker from the Visitor Centre. We hope you get a chance to visit the Brambly Hedge Trail this autumn!

We have very much enjoyed hearing your reactions to the newly published A Visit To Brambly Hedge book, lots of you have been commenting on the behind the scenes sketches from the archives. A feature in the Sunday Times by Nicolette Jones from September titled ‘How Brambly Hedge attracted a new generation of fans’ sparked a flurry of messages and comments from people who had a core Brambly Hedge memory unlocked, it seems Jill’s illustrations do become engrained in the memory.

Hopefully A Visit to Brambly Hedge will join our ever expanding list of translated editions, we’ll have more news on that soon. For now our new translated editions this autumn include a welcome return for Brambly Hedge to the Netherlands! It’s been many years since we have had Dutch editions in print, and now we can celebrate the return of Bramen Buurt with a new edition of Autumn Story, more Dutch editions are on their way. A new French edition of The High Hills has just published, titled Les Collines, the first time in nearly two decades that this title has been available in French. Both the Festive Colouring Book and the Nature Colouring Book have also been added to French translation list, as has Poppy’s Babies.

A host of very exciting new Brambly Hedge products have arrived on my desk this week, these include (but are not limited to) Oven Gloves, Tea Towels, a Glasses Case, Apron, Travel Mugs, and Insulated Drinks Bottles! These are mostly from our new spring range but will be available to purchase from our store imminently.

A Waterstones exclusive organic cotton Canvas Tote Bag is also now available, this features the Crabapple Cottage kitchen scene from Winter Story with the text ‘All the kitchens along Brambly Hedge were warm and busy’, just in time for some seasonal shopping!

As the leaves fall and the nights grow longer and colder, thoughts turn to the festive season… and we have some treats for you this year! Our first Advent Calendar has just launched, these feature a different Brambly Hedge illustration for each day throughout December and are available from our shop now.

The Festive Colouring Book celebrates its first birthday this year, full of illustrations and designs from autumn through to winter, ready for you to colour-in on cosy evenings as the light fades away. We’ve enjoyed seeing your colourful creations tagged on socials, so keep them coming to @bramblyhedgeofficial.

This year we have teamed up with National Trust Petworth House in West Sussex for an event inspired by the natural beauty of winter. The palatial rooms at Petworth will host a series of trees, lights, and displays to welcome the winter season, and the Brambly Hedge mice will be making an appearance in a couple of the displays at the event. We’ll post more news on our socials in the coming weeks, but the event will run from 29^th November 2025 to the 4^th January 2026, make a note in your diaries!

Speaking of which, we have just launched our 2026 Diaries, our A5 Brambly Hedge Diary and A6 Brambly Hedge Pocket Diary are available now, be quick though, as these tend to sell out fast. Also hot off the press is the 2026 Brambly Hedge Calendar, sold out every year for the past four years, it’s another one to get in early to avoid disappointment. Returning for 2026 after a hiatus in 2025 is the Year Planner Diary, perfect for notable dates on the move.

We hope that you find the time to get out into the forest and enjoy the final flourish of autumn colour before the storms whip away the leaves for winter. For now though, we wish you a fruitful autumn.

Pete Barklem

Late October 2025
England

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Summer 2025 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 06:47:11 +0000

Summer is very much here, and we are celebrating our 45^th year! After a dry and warm spring, the parched land could do with some rain, fortunately we’ve had a few showers to quench the earth this week and the blackberries are ripening fast in the warm glow of the July sun. It looks like it will be a very fruitful harvest this year!

The weighty bunches of blackberries found along your local hedgerow will soon also be found on the shelves of your local bookshop… on the cover of A Visit To Brambly Hedge. To celebrate the Brambly Hedge books first being published forty-five years ago in 1980, and after many requests from you all, a new updated edition of A Visit To Brambly Hedge will publish in the UK on the 28^th August and in the USA on 2^nd September.

The illustration featured on the front is particularly special, as it was never actually featured in the original eight Brambly Hedge books. Now, for the first time, it’s on the front cover of a Brambly Hedge book! The scene on this new edition of ‘A Visit’ features our community of mice helping each other to gather in the hedgerow bounty of blackberries, elderberries, and damsons, ready for preserving, pickling, and pouring into bottles to ferment over the coming months. It’s a scene repeated, albeit on a larger scale, across the nation as the harvest seasons rolls in, and all hands are on deck to make the most of the dry, sunny days, and long evenings.

Inside ‘A Visit to Brambly Hedge’ you’ll find maps, a family tree, and descriptions of all the Brambly Hedge mice, homes, and workplaces. You can take a journey through all the seasonal celebrations from icy Midwinter, through Spring to Midsummer, from the harvest to the falling leaves and warm fires of Autumn. We head up to visit the Voles in the High Hills and down to the shore to visit the mice who live by the sea.

Along the way we’ve featured many pencil sketches from the Jill’s archive, showing how some of her illustrations were researched, crafted, and developed over months of work in her studio. The book also looks at how Brambly Hedge began, and places across Britain that inspired her, from the ancient trees of Epping Forest, to the high rocky fells of the Lake District, and on to the wide sandy beaches of north Norfolk.

It’s been wonderful looking through the archives to find unpublished and even unseen sketches for this book, but in all honesty, this only scratches the surface. There are vast piles of Jill’s work that remain unseen by the public. From her art school projects in the late 1960s and early 70s, through her freelance illustrator days, and on to her Brambly Hedge era in the 1980s and 90s. Hopefully in future we can get these archives on display in London for you all to enjoy!

With the Summer holidays upon us, the Brambly Hedge Nature Colouring Book is your ideal companion! Featuring seasonal illustrations from Summer Story, Sea Story, and Poppy’s Babies, it’s the perfect time to get outside and make sure your colour pallet for each flower is correct! For those of you (and there are many!) who prefer the colder days and cosy evenings… the Festive Colouring Book starts with harvest scenes, especially blackberry picking, so you can get your pencils out and colour your way towards autumn!

If you are looking to visit something Brambly Hedge related over the summer, we have our new Summer Story Trail at Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset. The Trail includes a new Summer Story Brambly Hedge booklet and now has a new maze to navigate! The Trail is open daily all the way through to mid-November. Head over to the Abbotsbury Swannery page for more details.

In Epping Forest, the Brambly Hedge wooden sculptures are in place ready for the official Trail opening this autumn, but you are free to go and visit the mice basking in the summer sun if you wish! There’s also plenty of Brambly Hedge items in the Epping Forest visitor centre shop.

If you’re looking for Brambly Hedge puzzles, cards, gift wrap, and stationery a little closer to home in the UK, then your local bookshop should be able to help. We now also have two new products that are only available in Waterstones bookshops, the new Picnic Preparations 1000 piece jigsaw and a new organic cotton canvas tote bag featuring the crabapple roasting kitchen scene from Winter Story. Both items are now available to order exclusively from Waterstones.

As you know, we have many other puzzles available, including the Harvest scene featured on the front of A Visit to Brambly Hedge, head over to our shop to explore more.

The new edition of Country Life magazine has just landed on my desk and features a lovely feature titled ‘Tails from the hedgerow’, celebrating forty-five years of Brambly Hedge… how time flies when you’re busy harvesting!

Have a wonderful summer!

Pete Barklem
Late July 2025
England

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Spring 2025 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:33:44 +0000

2025 marks the 45^th anniversary of Brambly Hedge. The first four books, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter Story all published in September 1980. After a feature article in the Sunday Times, the books had to be reprinted due to demand and the phone rang off the hook with enquiries. Here in the middle of the second decade of the twenty first century, it seems you are all still quite keen on the little community of hedgerow mice!

Let’s take it right back to the beginning, to the late 1970s to be more precise. Jill Barklem, author of the Brambly Hedge books, lived on the edge of Epping Forest, located just to the north east of London. She would often head off into the forest to draw and photograph trees, something she had always done, but this time it was for a new project, a project that would become the Brambly Hedge books.

This year the mice are returning to Epping Forest! In Summer 2025 a new Brambly Hedge Sculpture Trail will open in Epping Forest. The first figurines arrived in a very muddy Epping Forest and were installed in February, just in time for the Duke of Gloucester’s visit to Epping Forest to celebrate his 50^th anniversary as Ranger of the Forest. There are seventeen figurines in total to find when the Trail opens this summer. The Trail will start at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre in Chingford and head up the newly created Gloucester Ride, and round the lake at Connaught Water. We would like to thank everyone who helped make the Brambly Hedge Trail possible, including the City of London Corporation and Rural England Prosperity Funding via Epping Forest District Council. Watch this space for more news on the Epping Forest Trail.

Keeping with Trails… we had a wonderful response from many of you who visited our Sea Story Trail at Abbotsbury Swannery in 2024. In 2025 a new trail is heading back to the Dorset coast at Abbotsbury. This year’s Trail will be based around Summer Story. Follow Dusty and Poppy as they prepare for their wedding day and set afloat on their wedding raft downstream to party the afternoon away. The Trail includes a new Brambly Hedge booklet with stamp points, questions to answer and fun facts. Activities and surprises can be found around the site, and make sure you don’t miss the swan feeds! The Trail is open daily from March 15^thall the way through to mid-November. Head over to the Abbotsbury Swannery page for more details.

It’s not just the Trails launching this spring… following on from the Festive Colouring Book, which featured illustrations from Autumn Story, The High Hills, Winter Story, and The Secret Staircase, we have just launched the new Nature Colouring Book! This colouring book features illustrations from Spring Story, Poppy’s Babies,Summer Story and Sea Story. It’s filled with quotations, detailed vignettes, full-page illustrations and double-page spreads. Many of your favourite illustrations are ready to add your own artistic flair, including the cross-section of Crabapple Cottage, Wilfred’s Spring Picnic, and the Sunset in the Meadow scene from Summer Story. The Nature Colouring Book is available now in the UK and will launch in the USA on the 29^th of April.

There’s been a lot of new products launching this spring, so many that it’s been difficult to keep up… so here we go!

We have our first set of Playing Cards, 52 cards presented in a beautifully sturdy box, and featuring the Blackberry Picking illustration on the reverse of each card, even the ace card features Primrose and Lord Woodmouse!

The same Blackberry Picking illustration from Autumn Story can also be found on our new drinks Coaster Set. The set includes four coasters with cork backing, perfect for brightening up your desk or coffee table. And if that’s not enough of the blackberry picking illustration for you, there is also a new set of Notecards with the same image. In addition, there is a new Notecard and Envelope Themed Box Set featuring four illustrations from Spring Story and Summer Story.

A whole run of new Spring Picnic pattern gift wrap items have just landed! We have new Gift Bags in two different sizes, as well as Spring Picnic Tissue Paper for padding or wrapping. Some stores in the UK are now stocking our new three metre roll of wrapping paper. As ever, we still offer our gift wrapping service in our shop, so if you want your items wrapped with a handwritten card included, just tick the box on the page.

Given that picnic season is fast approaching, we thought you might want a few items for your next outing… Napkins are finally here! We have had a lot of very excited enquiries about these. The pack features twenty 33x33cm paper napkins, perfect for the table or for your alfresco eating.

So you’ll be needing a drink with your picnic… we have a new range of Enamel Mugs for that; and there is one for each season to collect. These mugs are perfect for throwing in a bag and heading outdoors, and because they’re enamel, they shouldn’t break in the process! In addition to the seasonal range we also have Wilfred’s Book Mug, featuring him reading his favourite book, and we have two new mugs from Poppy’s Babies, the New Baby Mug, and the New Mum Mug.

“What about the washing up?” I hear you ask… we have new Brambly Hedge Tea Towels! One for each season, and they are lovely. More tea towel designs are on the way, so keep an eye on the socials.

Many of you have commented about how much you are enjoying our Cobble Hill 1000 piece seasonal collage puzzles, but we have also had requests for a 500 piece puzzle, and we now have two available! We have the pink Picnic Preparations Puzzle featuring the cake making kitchen scene from Spring Story. We will also soon be launching the ‘All Aboard’ puzzle, which features the cross-section of the Periwinkle boat from Sea Story.

There’s quite a lot more on the way later in spring, so stay tuned for further updates.

That’s quite enough product information for this blog! I’m off for a cup of tea outside with my new Spring Story mug.

Have a wonderful spring!

Pete Barklem
Mid March 2025
England

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Winter 2024/2025 Blog

Peter Barklem — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:01:13 +0000

Sometimes in late autumn it can take little while for that festive feeling to arrive, especially with grey clouds above and mildly mulched leaves beneath your feet, but this year feels a little different, weather-wise at least. Not only have we had a couple of frosts by mid-November, we’ve had two days of snow covering the fallen leaves. Winter is not just in the air, it has already arrived.

It’s not just the weather that is fuelling our festive feelings, this season we have introduced the new Brambly Hedge Festive Colouring Book! For many years we have had requests for a colouring book, so we are delighted to be able to provide one for you all.

While the title includes the word ‘festive’, this book takes you on a journey through the changing seasons, from the late summer blackberry harvest, through autumnal adventures in the High Hills, returning to the fireside for hot buttered toast, right through to the snow, ice, feasts, and festivities of Midwinter.

Inside you will find forty eight pages of illustrations and collages upon which to add your artistic flair. The Festive Colouring Book uses a combination of illustrations from Autumn Story, Winter Story, The High Hills, and The Secret Staircase. Whether it’s stringing up crabapples by the fire, the cross section of the Toadflax Hornbeam Tree in the snow, or the Midwinter celebrations around the hearth… we’re sure some of your favourite illustrations will be featured.

We would love to see some of your artistic skills and interpretations, so please do feel free to tag us on Instagram with your Festive Colouring Book creations.

Elsewhere in the publishing world, we have been overwhelmed with the reaction to our new French editions. Throughout 2024 new Les Souris Du Buisson Aux Mûres stories have arrived each season, with Winter Story having just been published. We are pleased to say that the second four Adventures in Brambly Hedge books will now be arriving in France in 2025 along with some new stationery products (which are looking wonderful!).

Back to the festive season though…we have our full range of Christmas card boxes to order from our festive shop, along with a new money wallet card, featuring a scene from The Secret Staircase Midwinter celebrations.

Last December our new Winter Story collage 1000 piece puzzle sold out before the festivities had even began. We’ve had another delivery for this winter, so hopefully we can make it to Christmas this year! In addition two new puzzles, this time 500 piece, are on the way in early 2025, so keep an eye out for those on our page.

If you’re looking for stocking fillers this year we have bookmarks, a writing set, a pencil case, and notebooks available, as well as our hand written gift wrap service if you are short on wrapping time.

Looking ahead to 2025, we have many new items available to help you organise your year. Our first Brambly Hedge Diaries have arrived! These (much requested) organisers will keep you in the right place at the right time, and might just give you a break from you phone screen. At the time of writing, our stock of the yellow A5 diary has completely sold out, but you might still be able to find one from Waterstones. The Brambly Hedge Pocket Diary is still available to order from our website, so we advise you head in that direction fairly swiftly if you want to get your paws on one!

The 2025 Brambly Hedge Calendar is always a good option to keep your wall seasonal throughout the year. We hand pick the twelve featured illustrations each year, swapping, adding, and removing artwork to keep each calendar unique. Again, we tend to run out of stock on these quickly.

What’s in our diary for 2025? Well.. quite a lot actually.

Whilst It’s been great fun bringing Festive Colouring Book together, choosing the illustrations, and creating festive patterns… we did feel it was a shame that some of your favourite illustrations from Spring and Summer could not be featured. However, we are very pleased to announce that the Brambly Hedge Nature Colouring Book will be arriving in spring 2025! More on that in our next update.

Epping Forest has long played an important part in the history of Brambly Hedge, it was where Jill grew up, where many of the trees that inspired Brambly Hedge are located, and now it will be home to a new Brambly Hedge Figurine Trail. The Epping Forest Trail will open in spring 2025, more details to follow in the New Year.

Many of you will have seen that we launched a new Brambly Hedge Trail this year at Abbotsbury Swannery on the Dorset Coast. Thank you to everyone who visited the Trail, we have had some wonderful feedback both from those who attended the Trail and the wonderful team at the Swannery. We are very pleased to announce that in 2025 there will be a new Brambly Hedge Trail at Abbotsbury Swannery, opening in the spring.

There will be many more Brambly Hedge products launching in the coming months, including tea towels and tote bags!

As another year draws to a close, we hope you all get some time to relax and reset… you have strict instructions from us to exert you inner ‘Mr & Mrs Apple by the fireside’ scene from Winter Story!

We hope you have a joyous festive season.

Pete Barklem
Early December 2024
England

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The Brambly Hedge Summer 2024 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:17:05 +0000

Summer 2024 Blog

It’s early August as I write, and it seems that summer has been sponsored by ‘sideways drizzle’ here in the UK… but that hasn’t dampened spirits down on the Dorset coast!

The Brambly Hedge Trail at Abbotsbury Swannery has been in full swing through spring and summer. We had a wonderful visit to the Abbotsbury in May for the annual food and craft fair, we were just in time to see the swan cygnets hatching and taking their first paddle in the Fleet. It was great to see all of you filling in your Brambly Hedge activity books… it even looked like the parents were having a good time, some clambering to get hold of their Brambly Hedge sticker at the end of the Trail! In addition to the Trail, this August there are now Brambly Hedge mice to find within the Willow Maze. The Brambly Hedge Trail is open until early November, make sure you visit if you’re passing through the west country!

The Brambly Hedge Festive Colouring Book is nearly here! We are very excited about this one, we have had so many requests from you all to create a colouring book and now I have a copy in my hands! Despite the ‘Festive’ word in the title, it’s not just for Christmas/Midwinter. The Colouring Book is also about preparation for the festive season, it takes you on a journey from the late summer blackberry harvest, through autumnal adventures in the High Hills, returning to the cosy fireside for hot buttered toast, right through to the snow, ice, and festivities of Midwinter. The Brambly Hedge Colouring Book will be launched on the 12^th September the UK (24^th in the USA) and is available to pre-order now here.

Our puzzle range continues to expand, the latest addition to our Museums and Galleries range is ‘The Harvest’, very apt for this time of year! This illustration was never featured in the original eight Brambly Hedge books, but was used in the Visit to Brambly Hedge book. The mice are seen busying away colleting blackberries and sloes from the hedgerow, something we’ll all be doing in the coming weeks no doubt! ‘The Harvest’ puzzle is available from our shop and also from Waterstones bookshop.

New translated editions of the Brambly Hedge books keep arriving on my desk. We are very pleased to have new Norwegian editions publishing in September this year, these will be available from our new publishers in Oslo, Cappelen Damm. We also have a Polish edition of Spring Story, and the new French translation of Summer Story.

A couple of the leaves on the beech tree outside the window have started to turn already, so on that note… enjoy what’s left of this summer!

Pete Barklem

August 2024

England

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Celebrating 30 years of Poppy’s Babies

Peter Barklem — Fri, 03 May 2024 10:46:54 +0000

The positive reception of the first Four Seasons of the Brambly Hedge book series had taken Jill by surprise in the early eighties, and it soon became clear that she would not be putting down her trusty brown pen and extensive range of paintbrushes any time soon. She took the mice on new adventures, high into the upper canopy of the Old Oak Palace in The Secret Staircase in 1983, even higher into the High Hills in 1986, down to the coast in Sea Story in 1990, and then back home to nest with Poppy’s Babies 30 years ago in 1994.

Jill always had ideas for new books floating around in her head, and largely that’s where they stayed! However, we are lucky to have a vast archive of her notes and sketches, many of which involve meticulous research for each of the published eight books, but also the saplings of other potential projects.

Her research for Poppy’s Babies can trace its way back to the Secret Staircase, which you may recall features an old nursery with toys, puzzles, and a four poster cot! Jill had lots of books about children’s toys and furniture through the ages, as well as collecting items from various antique shops. She also visited the V&A Museum of Childhood (now Young V&A), just a short London Underground journey from her home in Epping to Bethnal Green in East London. This extensive research and first-hand experience of bringing up little scamps like yours truly, all provided useful source material for book eight.

The landscape illustration scene of kitchen chaos in the middle of the book is very reminiscent of the Barklem household in the 1980s, even the oil lamp hanging over the table is illustrated directly from the actual oil lamp that sat on our kitchen table at the time. To this day, we are still finding household items and kitchen utensils that appear in illustrations within the pages of her books.

It’s no coincidence that Poppy’s Babies is set in late May, it was Jill’s favourite month. With new life flourishing, hawthorn in blossom, a white haze of cow parsley and wild garlic flowers; the air fills with verdant freshness as spring drifts into summer.

In this book, the Brambly Hedge community notice that Poppy and Dusty are struggling with their new babies in the noisy flour mill, so they all club together to transform a derelict hawthorn tree into a freshly painted and far more suitable home: Mayblossom Cottage. The theme of community working together to help those in need runs deep in this story, and it’s a narrative that forms the backbone of many of the most popular stories today. A little kindness goes a long way.

Whilst it’s sad that Poppy’s Babies was Jill’s last full book before illness interrupted her work, we are very lucky to have the eight books she produced.

Throughout May and June 2024 we will be posting some behind the scenes and archive material from Poppy’s Babies on our social channels, so keep an eye out for those.

Enjoy the rest of Spring, and here’s hoping for a glimmer of sunshine in early summer!

Pete Barklem
Early May 2024
England

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The Brambly Hedge Spring 2024 Blog

Lizzie Barklem — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 17:39:52 +0000

A blizzard of blossom is flying at high speed past my window, it seems the barrage of bad weather that started back in December has no intention of abating! We have had an incredibly wet and windy winter here, with very few frosts, and not a single flake of snow. Whilst the wind is doing its best to blow this year’s blossom season into last week, the odd moments calm spring sunshine seem all the more sweet.

However, high tides and damaging winds have not stopped the team at Abbotsbury Swannery from launching the new 2024 Brambly Hedge Trail on time though… on the 16^th March the doors opened to the public. We visited the proposed location for the Trail on the Dorset coast last year and it was immediately clear that the site was perfect for bringing Sea Story to life. The stream running down off the Dorset hills, through the fields and along the hedgerows, past the reed beds, and out into the blue sea beyond the Fleet, absolutely ideal for a mouse adventure!

The Sea Story Trail follows the Brambly Hedge mice on their journey aboard the Periwinkle down the stream to collect salt supplies from the Sea Mice. The Trail is perfect for families and includes a little Brambly Hedge booklet that is filled with illustrations, questions to answer, and stamps to collect around the Swannery site. Explore the site looking for the Brambly Hedge characters, see if you can see the find the Periwinkle sailing down the stream, and if you collect all the stamps in your booklet, you get a Brambly Hedge sticker!

Make sure you catch the swans being fed, and get there in time to see the cygnets, usually May is the best month for this. The Trail is included in the standard ticket price and will be open right through until early November. Many of our new Brambly Hedge products can be found at the shop on site too. For more details head over to the Trail page.

Hopping across the channel from the Dorset coast, after an absence of twenty years, the Brambly Hedge books are now published in French! After many, many requests on social media from you all for these translations to be produced… Spring Story has just been launched with our new publishers, Qilinn, under the Les souris du Buisson-aux-mûres name. Summer Story will follow in May, then Autumn and Winter later this year as the seasons unfurl.

In addition to the new French editions, in 2024 we have further translations publishing in Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Czech, Bulgarian, with more languages arriving later in the year.

We are getting very excited about the publication of one book in particular this year, The Brambly Hedge Colouring Book! The new Colouring Book will arrive in the UK in September 2024 and will be themed around the Autumn and Winter festivities. The forty-eight-page book will be filled with quotations, detailed vignettes, full page illustrations and stunning double page spreads, all waiting for your creative sparkle! More details will follow in the Summer, pre-orders for the UK are now open.

The Brambly Hedge Jigsaw Book published in the UK in autumn last year alongside a wave of jigsaw related items. Many of our seasonal collage puzzles from Cobble Hill completely sold out of over the winter season, many of you have been getting in contact requesting the Winter Story puzzle to complete the set, we’re pleased to announce that more stock has arrived this week! Head over to our shop now if you are still waiting to add the Winter Story jigsaw to your collection.

We have just launched a new ‘Harvest’ jigsaw puzzle featuring a scene of the mice busying away collecting fruits and berries. The eagle eyed among you will notice that this illustration was never actually published in the original eight Brambly Hedge books. However, it was used in The Visit to Brambly Hedge book, published back in the year 2000, but not currently in print.

It’s been a very long time since we have had a Brambly Hedge pencil case available, but the wait is over! We have just launched a new organic cotton pencil case featuring the ‘Sunset in the Meadow’ illustration from Summer Story.

With all those pens and pencils you will need something to write on… well, we have you covered there too. New to the shop we have our ‘Blackberry Picking’ Lined journal with 200 pages to write down all those wonderful ideas floating round in your head.

We also have a new Mini Notecard Cube, featuring 20 little notecards and envelopes featuring four seasonal Brambly Hedge Illustrations. For Spring we have new ‘Snoozing Under the Bluebells’ notecard pack as well as a new bookmark featuring the same illustration.

As you can see, there is quite a lot going on at the moment! Which brings me to a new service we offering… we can now gift wrap your orders! Our lovely new Brambly Hedge wrapping paper will be used to wrap your gift, we will then add a message of your choice to a mini Brambly Hedge notecard and send the wrapped gift and notecard to the address you have provided. Hopefully saving you a bit time when sending your Brambly hedge gifts!

That pretty much wraps things up for Spring. This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the publication of Poppy’s Babies, so watch out for further updates in May, when hopefully the rain and wind will have eased!

Have a wonderful spring!

Pete Barklem

Early April 2024

England

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