Tanglewood by Gillian McClure introduces young readers to the concept of rewilding and what that can do for our woodland spaces and the creatures that inhabit them. It also offers an opportunity to talk about being welcoming and understanding to those who are not the same as you and how when we do that our lives are enriched.
Gillian very kindly wrote for us about where her idea came from and how she brought the story and illustrations together to create her new book…
Tanglewood is a sleepy, old wood. It’s where Fox, Rat and Crow live, and they have a lot to grumble about. One day, they see a big footprint. Who does it belong to? Who is the strange creature that has come to live in their wood? It’s eating the bramble bushes, knocking down small trees, wallowing in mud and leaving a lot of dung. Fox, Rat and Crow want it to leave, but Tanglewood doesn’t agree.
Tanglewood started back in December 2022 when I was asked by Kent Wildlife Trust to write a picture book text about rewilding a bison. However, my story was not chosen. I put it away and worked on something else. A year later, a sketch of an old, tangled walnut tree made me look again at the story I’d written a year before, and it set off in a new direction. The focus now was going to be on a sleepy, overgrown wood that communicated mysteriously with the earth, below ground; a passing reference to the ‘wood-wide web’. I would call my story Tanglewood and keep all my animal characters from the first draft.
When I came to illustrating it in watercolour, I decided against having all double page spreads with dark woodland backgrounds. Instead, I would have mainly vignettes on the white page, showing the animal characters emerging from the tangle of the wood. This way there would be a greater emphasis on their interaction with each other, rather than static scenes. There would be a couple of exceptions, one being the spread on the final page showing Tanglewood wide awake and buzzing with life.
I drew on memories from my childhood when writing and illustrating this story. As a child, I lived in West Sussex, very close to Knepp, now a rewilding centre. My father was a nature poet and countryman who knew the birds and their songs and where to watch badgers, while my mother taught us the names of the butterflies and flowers and showed us the secret woodland places where rare orchids grew, and wild daffodils bloomed in the spring. Now I live in a city, and I see the countryside of my childhood vanishing and children today missing out on the natural world I took for granted.
In this book, I want to inspire children to connect with the natural world, to spark their curiosity, and encourage them to feel a feel a responsibility to protect the environment.
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Many thanks to Gillian for sharing the background of Tanglewood – which Nicola Davies described as “A gorgeous, engaging story which shows that forests need animals just as much as animals need forests”. You can find out more about Tanglewood and Gillian’s other titles using the links below.
