The book cover for “Harry & Hilda: Letters Home.” (Photo courtesy Jennifer Hamlin Church)
As lupine season approaches, a new book offers readers the inside scoop on the long life of Maine’s “lupine lady,” the real-life woman who scattered lupine seeds from South Bristol to Damariscotta, inspiring the fictional character in Barbara Cooney’s beloved children’s book, “Miss Rumphius.”
“Harry & Hilda: Letters Home” is a lively biography of Hilda Hamlin, the “real Miss Rumphius” who nurtured the lupines at her summer cottage in Christmas Cove.
Subtitled “The Sparkling Life of the Lupine Lady and the Professor Who Made It Possible,” the book by Jennifer Hamlin Church begins with Hilda’s uncle, Harry Norman Gardiner, who came to America from England in 1874 at the age of 18 and years later, began teaching philosophy at the new Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
Before long, Gardiner began summering in South Bristol. One of the early rusticators in the Midcoast region, he boarded with local families before building his own cottage in 1903. The next spring, he invited his teenage niece from England to spend two summers with him in Maine. During the intervening year, she would attend high school in Northampton, Mass. Hamlin came planning to stay for 15 months. Instead, she lived in America until her death, 85 years later.
Hamlin flung lupine seeds for decades, but became famous for it only in the last 15 years of her life. A 1971 feature by Storrs Lee introduced “Hilda Lupina” to readers of Yankee magazine. Eleven years later, “Miss Rumphius” introduced the lupine lady to children and adults across the country.
Although Cooney also had other inspirations for her picture book, Hamlin, whom she had met during her student years at Smith College, was the real person who had scattered lupines and lived by the sea. (The closing illustration in Miss Rumphius includes the inscription, “with thanks to Hilda.”
Gardiner’s cottage, still in use by Hamlin’s descendants, was the model for Cooney’s depiction of Alice Rumphius’ house by the sea.
Jennifer Hamlin Church had always known about her grandmother’s storied life (including years spent in Hemingway’s Paris and raising three boys as a single mother long before divorce was acceptable), but she was not inspired to write about it until many years after Hamlin’s death.
“It was the letters that did it,” Hamlin Church said, referring to the discovery of hundreds of old letters, diaries, and unpublished memoirs that had been hidden for decades in the Christmas Cove cottage and in family attics and basements; where they had been moved when Hilda, in her nineties, left her apartment to live with one of her sons.
“We always knew Hilda was interesting. She told us many stories about her childhood,” Church said. “She and Uncle met lots of famous people, too. She loved telling us about that.”
In reading page after page of handwritten correspondence, from the 1870s through the 1980s, Church gained a much more nuanced idea of the ups and downs of her grandmother’s life, and the lives of Hamlin’s parents and siblings in England.
“We knew that three of her brothers fought in World War I and three fought in World War II, but that was it. Now I was reading letters from the front—and letters from her anxious parents who were being bombed back in England—and Hilda’s own comments about it all,” Church said. “The history really came alive.”
There were surprises, too, Hamlin Church said, “My grandmother liked telling a good story and was prone to a little melodrama. I know now that sometimes she didn’t tell the whole story, and other times, she just stayed mum—there was a lot she never mentioned.”
Asked what she learned writing the book, Hamlin Church said, “I gained great respect for both Harry and Hilda, not just for the things that made them famous in their own times, but for their strength and persistence as newcomers to this country. They followed unconventional paths, guided by the things they loved, and they both built fulfilling lives.
“Starting this project, I knew Hilda as my grandmother. I didn’t really know her as a girl, or a wife, or a middle-aged woman. Now I know how hard she worked to keep herself curious and engaged and to ensure that her life was satisfying. Like Miss Rumphius, she made her world beautiful, but she did it in many ways.
“Hilda’s story is about a lot more than lupines.”
“Harry & Hilda: Letters Home” is available at Sherman’s bookstores throughout Maine, and from the South Bristol Historical Society.
Hamlin Church will be present at a book-signing in Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop Damariscotta on Saturday, June 22, and will speak about her book and the research behind it at a meeting of the South Bristol Historical Society Wednesday evening, Aug. 14.
Jennifer Hamlin Church is a native of New England now living in Petersburg, Mich. The daughter of the late Norman and Barbara Hamlin, of Brunswick, she has visited the family cottage in Christmas Cove since her earliest days. A graduate of Middlebury College (VT) and the University of Minnesota, she worked in higher education for thirty-five years, and also spent four summers on the staff of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle.
“Harry & Hilda: Letters Home” is her third book, following “So Much to Live For, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Living On,” and “Hail, Siena! The First 100 Years of Siena Heights University.”
