A Garden Called Home

Written by Jessica J. Lee | Published by Tundra Books Feb 2024

“Mama was born in a country far away from here. I love her stories about warm rain in winter and green mountains. And now Mama's taking me there!

When a young girl and her mother go to visit her family, the girl notices a change. At home, her mother mostly stays inside. Here, her mother likes to explore and go hiking. The girl has never seen her so happy! Her mother tells her about the trees, bushes, flowers and birds. Did you know that tree roots make mountains strong? And that ài hāo (mugwort) is used to make delicious, sweet dumplings?

But her mother's smile goes away when they return home. It's cold and she doesn't want to go outside. She goes back to wearing her big quilted jackets and watering her houseplants.

How can the girl show her mother that nature here can be wondrous too?”

What drew me to this particular story was the tender and nurturing relationship between this mother and daughter pair. And how the daughter was the one who taught the mom something about their new home and inspired her to make some changes. I grew up with mainly just my mother by my side as well, thus I resonated with many aspects of this story. Even the details of moving to a new country were similar to my own experiences.

A lot of the winter imagery was inspired by scenes of Toronto, where I first immigrated to at the age of 10. As I currently live in Vancouver, even painting the Toronto snowy scenes became nostalgic for me, and ended up being some of my favourite pieces. Having visited Taiwan, I also brought those travel memories to mind when painting the “home country” sceneries. My experiences of background painting for animation and my love of plein-air painting became super useful in this book, that is filled with landscapes and illustrations that show us the wonder of nature.