Book Nook: A Garden for Grace

 

Combining beautiful poetry with stunning hand-drawn floral illustrations, A Garden for Grace by Ellen Mainville is an exploration of family, love, and life through lessons inspired by the beauty of nature.

Sadly, after three years of detailed illustration and poetic crafting, Ellen Mainville was 98 percent finished when she died of COVID-19 in September 2021. The book has been published posthumously, thanks to the help of Ellen’s loved ones.

A Garden for Grace showcases more than 50 full-color illustrations alongside children’s poems about flowers in the garden and the family that grows them. For children, parents, and grandparents alike, A Garden for Grace was inspired both by Ellen’s relationship with her grandmother Grace as well as her own childhood copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses by R. L. Stevenson. Featuring the blooms Ellen received from her grandmother, this book is a botanically accurate guide to 48 common garden flowers.

“Ellen Mainville touched so many lives with her art, poetry and gentle wisdom,” said Ann Carlson, publisher of ABCarlson Publishing. “Charming to read alone at any age, this book really sings when it is read to a child. The pictures are imaginative and playful, yielding up surprises like frolicking kittens and hidden mice, and the rhyming poetry is delightfully melodic and alliterative.”

Although not Ellen’s only published work, this book was the closest to her heart and the gift she most wished to offer to the world. “Ellen wrote and drew what she loved,” Carlson said. “Although she left us far too early, her book is her witness to the joy and strength she found in family and in nature: ‘though she can’t linger here too long, each flower sings her heart a song.’”

About the Author

Ellen Mainville (1955-2021) lived in Northern New York with her husband Mark and dog Coco, in a Victorian house with abundant flower gardens. Many of these flowers came originally from her grandmother Grace, on the farm where Ellen was raised. They were carefully transplanted from place to place, wherever she moved—their origin, growing patterns, and propagation meticulously documented in her daily “garden book.” Ellen previously published All My Days (2017), an illustrated book of meditations, and was 98 percent finished with A Garden For Grace, when she became a casualty of the great pandemic of 2020-21: victim of an autoimmune disease combined with breakthrough Covid-19. Yet even at the end, as she knew her God was calling her home, she was giving instructions for the completion of her book. This is a gift of her heart to all who knew or will come to know her.

Ellen gave her son Andrew, himself an artist and poet, creative control of the final publication.  Andrew tells of “a vision I had as a child, of my mother strolling in her garden in the early morning hours. A garden she poured her love into, to create and cultivate beauty within its borders that she had created at our old house in New York. I can still see the delight in her, a small smile ever-present upon her face, as she admired God’s gift of beauty on this earth.  A vision that will never leave me, just as flowers will always remind me of her love.”