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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In the Brambly Hedge books, the tree is home to Mrs and Mrs Apple, and features prominently in Spring Story, where Jill uses her distinctive cross-section illustration style to capture the interior of the tree in minute detail and the exterior in full blossom.

The crabapple is believed to be the only known pollarded tree of its species in the Forest, it stands near Barn Hoppitt and Warren Pond and is close to the City of London Corporation’s Epping Forest Visitor Centre at Chingford, where a small Brambly Hedge exhibit is on display until September 2026.

The discovery builds on the growing celebration of the books’ connection to Epping Forest and the surrounding landscape. The inspiration for the Hornbeam Tree, home of the Toadflax family, was also discovered in Epping Forest in 2023.  Sculptures of the inhabitants of Crabapple Cottage – Mr and Mrs Apple – can be found near the start of the Brambly Hedge Trail, which was launched in October 2025. The Trail features 17 carved oak sculptures within the forest.

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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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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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Introducing the New Brambly Hedge Pop-Up Book

Step in to the enchanting world of the hedgerow, follow Mrs Apple through the seasons, and explore Jill Barklem’s exquisite illustrations in glorious 3D.

The Pop-Up book is now available in the USA-order HERE

Share your adventures with us on Twitter @bramblyhedge_ as well as on Facebook and Instagram at Brambly Hedge Official. 

 

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