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.