Kathryn Aalto ~ The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh ~ A Garden Club & First Parish Lyceum Program

Kathryn Aalto (r) with Bridget Clayton at the book signing after Aalto’s Bedford talk, co-sponsored by the Bedford Garden Club and First Parish Lyceum – Image (c) Andrea Cleghorn, 2018 all rights reserved – Click to view larger image

By Andrea Cleghorn

Celebrating Kathryn Aalto’s talk about Ashdown Forest, also known as the Hundred Acre Wood with a Winnie-the-Pooh cake – Image (c) Andrea Cleghorn, 2018 all rights reserved – Click to view larger image

Before an enthusiastic audience of more than 100 at First Parish on the Common, author Kathryn Aalto talked about her book, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh. Her talk here was co-sponsored by the Bedford Garden Club and First Parish Lyceum.

A nature writer, landscape designer, and historian, Aalto talked about the physical world of 1920s-era England that provided the landscape for the well-loved children’s book Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

Aalto spoke in the sanctuary at First Parish – Image (c) Andrea Cleghorn, 2018 all rights reserved – Click to view a larger image

A.A. Milne’s fictional series, illustrated by E.H. Shepard, centered on his own young son, Christopher Robin, and his stuffed bear. Pooh, whose name was taken from a bear in the Winnipeg Zoo, was joined by Piglet, Tigger, Kanga and Roo, Owl, Eeyore, and Rabbit.

Aalto talked about the setting of the Hundred Acre Wood, which is Ashdown Forest about an hour’s drive south of London, an area of heath and woodland. “A lot of old trees came down in the hurricane of 1987,” she said. But the area is “highly protected as AANB, an Area of Natural Beauty and looks very much as it did 100 years ago, including the bridge (now refurbished, but one of the humble but best-known bridges in the world) where the characters played Poohsticks, tossing pine cones into the river below and rushing to the other side of the bridge to see whose floated by first.

In his two volumes of Pooh books, Milne created a community that exemplified altruism, loyalty, and kindness.

Free-range childhood is how Aalto described how children lived 100 years ago, a world in which an 8-year-old would be free to wander miles on his own.

The safety still exists, Aalto commented. A California native, she has lived in Dorset, England, for 12 years (“the real Exeter,” she said, laughing). She talked about living in a place with a network of footpaths that gave her own family a way of appreciating the outdoors together. She spent a lot of time researching the Ashdown Forest with her younger son.

Aalto is in New England on a tour that was taking her next to a visit with children’s author Tommy DePaola in New London, N.H., a talk at the Museum of Fine Arts on September 23, and another at the Harvard Book Store on November 15.