The Complete Brambly Hedge: The gorgeously illustrated children’s classics delighting kids and parents for over 40 years!

Product Information

A love of cooking goes hand in hand with the many fun feasts, picnics, and festivals that go on in Brambly Hedge. From birthday picnics to Naming Ceremonies to weddings, the mice of Brambly Hedge eagerly await any opportunity to celebrate. It is easily the most magical and fantastical of the Brambly Hedge seasonal stories - the Ice Hall is gorgeous and the later illustrations in this book benefit from its majestic blue-green pillars and high ceilings. And, in typical Brambly fashion, the more mundane scenes of kitchens and storerooms are just as impressive. It would not be a Brambly book without at least two kitchen illustrations, and this book has some of my favorites. This is the only seasonal Brambly book to be set mostly at night, which gives the illustrations a warm and magical quality.

The Four Seasons of Brambly Hedge was one of my favorite books when I was little. Those little mice were the cutest thing ever, their adventures were always dreamy and the illustrations were phenomenal. Brambly Hedge has a traditional layout with the living spaces on the ground floor and the bedrooms upstairs. It's decorated in a chic, timeless style that suits contemporary guests and harmonises with the gardens and countryside views. The Complete Brambly Hedge (1999) — 1 volume, produced for The Book People/Ted Smart by HarperCollins (7.75x10in)

Christmas at Brambly Hedge

I learned about these books through Snapdragons, a blog about the domestic adventures of a new mom. The author of the blog had grown up reading these stories and was very excited about the prospect of sharing them with her own child. I'd never heard of them, but as I'm always on the look out for new books to read with The Four-Year-Old, I spent a week or two hunting them down. The illustrations are beautiful, detailed and heart warming and the story lines sweet, imaginative and fanciful. There are ongoing themes of friendship, community spirit and sharing throughout the whole timeless collection.

Baby Mice in Brambly Hedge (1999) is a joint publication version of Summer Story and Poppy's Babies.

Other popular towns / villages in Cumbria

The stories are charming, but it's the illustrations with their incredibly rich detail that won my heart. Small wonder each drawing took Jill Barklem three months to complete. (Each book in the series is the product of two years' effort.) The Mice of Brambly Hedge Celebrate (1998) is a joint publication version of Winter Story and Secret Staircase. There is a wonderful community of mice that live in a hedgerow called Brambly Hedge. Here life is peaceful and busy. They spend the spring and summer months collecting nuts, berries, and various fruits and flora for deliciously homemade jams and baked goods. Everything is kept in the Store Stump, an enormous tree stump that has many rooms for everything a mouse might need. A tale where a grandiose palace of ice and a warm fireside kitchen are equally honored in the life of the community.

Jill’s love of the English countryside and her exceptionally observant eye for nature meant that her closely focused illustrations of trees, hedgerows, piles of leaves and luscious seasonal berries were as botanically correct as they were painterly. Her mice, too, were properly mouse-like, even while the stories about them, many of which are about sustainability, self-sufficiency and survival, are very human.When the residents of Brambly Hedge - a community of woodland mice all living together in a small settlement on the other side of the stream, across the field... amongst the tangled roots and stems" - wake up one winter morning and find their world has been blanketed in fresh snow, they respond in their usual fashion: by working, and then celebrating as a group. Digging tunnels to connect all the residences of the hedge with one another, and with the Store Stump, they decide to honor the traditions of the ancestors, and hold a Snow Ball... I guess I always come to these books expecting some kind of conflict - which is typically a given element of any story. Yet I'm realizing that the Brambly stories are more concerned with recording the doings of a community rather than creating some grand narrative. If you're looking for main characters, there really aren't any, and the mice go about their business with no hinderances, delays, or natural predators. Instead, this is an ensemble piece showing a warm, rustic, and healthy community that comes together around the two great unifying factors: food, and dance. Of any of the seasonal stories, this entry probably depicts those factors the best, as it's entirely devoted to showing the effort it takes to prepare for a grand ball, and how that effort is handsomely rewarded. Two of the house's three bedrooms have king-sized beds and are beautifully furnished to create a private place to retreat at the end of the day. Both rooms have rural views and an HD Smart TV.