Exploring the English wood where Winnie-the-Pooh and friends roamed
Author’s curiosity about the world of Christopher Robin and his animal pals so lovingly laid out in children’s author A. A. Milne’s tales led her to write a book about Ashdown Forest, near London, the inspiration for Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, and the farm where Milne lived
Just about everyone knows Winnie-the-Pooh. We’re also familiar with Christopher Robin, the young boy who was one of Pooh Bear’s best friends. And Pooh’s posse: Tigger, Eeyore, Owl and the rest, all of whom roamed the Hundred Acre Wood of A.A. Milne’s writings.
Milne’s stories were fictional, of course. Well, to a point.
“I think people forget there was a real story,” says author Kathryn Aalto. “Disney slicked it up a little bit. Pooh Bear has an American accent and a US mailbox. But there’s a real story.”
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Aalto tells that story in The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest That Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood.
Aalto is a landscape designer, historian and speaker with master’s degrees in garden history and creative non-fiction. A California native, she and her husband and their three children moved in 2007 to England, where he is a geology professor at the University of Exeter.
She remembers flying into England, looking out of the plane and wondering how her kids would react to their new lives. On her third day, she came across a book on walking.
“That started it. I wanted to get my kids out and give them the same kind of outdoorsy, free-range childhood I had,” Aalto said. “I was also reading them a lot of classics. I was reading Winnie-the-Pooh to them. Because I was here, I was thinking, ‘Who is Christopher Robin? Is there a Hundred Acre Wood?’”