Flower Fables

“Fairyland” was familiar territory to young Louisa May Alcott and her sisters, for they had often romped there and explored its secrets under the guidance of family friend, Henry David Thoreau. Fifteen years her elder, Thoreau led the Alcott girls and their friends on berry-picking expeditions in the wooded land around Walden Pond, which he fancifully called “fairyland.” It was on a piece of this land, owned by neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, that the girls’ father, Amos Bronson Alcott, helped Thoreau build the now-famous cabin where he lived “deliberately” and wrote Walden. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. The remarkable convergence of 19th century writers in Concord, Massachusetts may be glimpsed in this collection of stories inspired during visits to Walden Woods. The Alcott family often visited Thoreau to swim in the cove near his cabin or explore the changing seasons in this tranquil spot. I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. With Thoreau as a guide, Louisa and the other children learned much about nature, but Louisa in particular delighted in another aspect of Thoreau’s point of view. The very fact that he called the woods “Fairyland” opened up a new way of thinking in the young writer’s mind. Whether he pointed out a new animal track, made a perfect bird call or discovered a bit of a cobweb and called it a fairy’s handkerchief, it was all magic to Louisa and fodder for her lively imagination.