My interest in Maine began when I was about eight years old and my mother gave me a copy of “Miss Rumphius,” which follows a proudly independent woman named Alice Rumphius as she grows up, works in a library, and travels as far as Southeast Asia and North Africa. She eventually settles down in a small home in coastal Maine with a cat, a view of the islands, and a determination to “make the world more beautiful.” She achieves this by spreading the seeds of lupine flowers all over the countryside, an undertaking that earns her the moniker the Lupine Lady. There is no mention of husbands, or marriage, or childbearing; this, for me, has always been an enormous part of the appeal.
The book is based, in part, on Hilda Hamlin, a real “lupine lady” who moved to the United States from England in 1904, went to Smith College—which Cooney also attended—and settled on the coast of Maine, where she spread the seeds. Big-leaf lupines, Katherine Brewer, a curator of living collections at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens tells me, are a non-native species. Some consider them invasive. But they’re beautiful nonetheless, exploding in hues of purple and pink, which Cooney lovingly detailed, using acrylics and colored pencils on paper made of gesso-coated percale.
One early afternoon in July, I went to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, in Brunswick, Maine. There, I met curators who invited me to view the original illustrations for a number of Cooney’s picture books, including “Miss Rumphius.” I was taken aback by how she was able to render even the tiniest detail of a dog’s tongue, a girl’s braid, a blade of grass—and, of course, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of lupines.
In various drafts, Cooney made notes to herself about everything from Alice Rumphius’s style of dress—Cooney considered, then rejected, putting a hat on her—to the colors of the ocean in an illustration of her protagonist’s journey to a Pacific island. Cooney learned to paint as a child and dedicated her early adulthood to perfecting her craft as an illustrator. Later, she had four children of her own. “She taught them to see what she saw,” Sarah Mackenzie writes, in a recent picture book about Cooney. “To love what she loved, to take in the delicious wild world.”
