Adventures at Wilder Farm

Lita and I just returned from England and jumped back into the world with last week’s release of Pennies for Elephants!

We’ve seen a few nice reviews so far in the local paper, at The Miss Rumphius Effect, and in the Concord Monitor.

But let’s go back to England for a moment. We pulled the plan together quickly after Lita got the green light on a new book. The book is about Walter Rothschild, a member of the famous banking family, who as a 7 year old announced to his parents that he was going to build a museum. He was born a few years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and, like Darwin, he collected bugs, butterflies, birds, fish, reptiles, plants, live animals and animal specimens. He eventually did work for the family bank, but he also followed his dream of opening his museum, and with the help of two curators and many explorers, Walter created the largest natural history collection ever gathered by one person. It became one of the most important collections for proving many of Darwin’s theories, and is still used extensively today for DNA studies.

The trip was part research, part vacation. We started our England trip at Kew Gardens to get some visual reference of strange plants and Victorian greenhouses.

Then we spent a few days at the Walter Rothschild’s Tring Museum, which is now part of the British Natural History Museum.

And finally we spent seven beautiful days up in the Lake district where we hiked about 7-10 miles every day, enjoyed afternoon teas, and visited Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, and the Beatrix Potter gallery in Hawkshead. The picture below is from a glorious hike above the Borrowdale Valley. I’m not sure there’s ever been such perfect weather in northwest England!

Lita has a busy summer schedule. In July we’re hoping to get down to Manhattan, then she’ll be at ALA in Chicago, then an SCBWI conference near Baltimore. And we’ve got a bunch of other events in the works for the summer! We’re ready for another vacation…

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