Cobble Hill - Brambly Hedge Summer Story 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

The wedding book, laid out as a page of illustrations with the story still printed alongside them. Jill Barklem's Summer Story, which is the one where Poppy Eyebright marries Dusty Dogwood.

What you are looking at

A collage of plates from the book rather than one scene, with the title panel across the top and passages of Barklem's text between the pictures. The mice of Brambly Hedge appear throughout, and the settings are the ones readers remember: the kitchen with its shelves of preserves, the dairy, the stream bank, a pink and white striped marquee, a tiered wedding cake, the bridal procession through the grass.

The centre panel is the one to look at properly. It is Barklem's signature device: a cutaway through a tree trunk showing every room inside it at once, staircases, storerooms, beds, a mill wheel, all drawn in the same obsessive detail as a real cross-section. That single panel is the reason this artwork survives being cut into a thousand pieces.

What it is like to build

The cream borders and the printed text are the structure. The panels are separated by plain pale gaps carrying blocks of type, and those pieces are the easiest in the box. Do them first and the picture divides itself into a dozen small independent scenes.

Then sort by panel, using palette. The kitchen is warm brown and copper, the stream scenes are green and pale blue, the marquee is pink and white, the tree cutaway is all soft timber browns. Very little of it is confusable.

The tree cutaway is the long one and the reward. It is dense, all one family of browns, and made of dozens of tiny rooms. Save it for when you have the borders in and can work into a closed hole, and go room by room rather than trying to sweep across it.

Why the Cobble Hill cut helps

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut rather than a grid, so the pieces are irregular and no two are alike. That matters on a multi-panel image, because the plain cream borders repeat all over the picture and the shape is the only thing keeping them apart. The board has a linen print texture, and the poster is included, which on artwork this detailed is genuinely needed rather than a nicety.

Specifications

A little context

Brambly Hedge has been in print since 1980 and the audience for it now is largely people who were read it as children, which makes this a different purchase from a decorative puzzle. It is worth knowing that Barklem researched the botany properly, so the hedgerow plants are real species drawn accurately, and the puzzle is a better nature study than most things sold as one. There is a matching Nature Journal: Spring if that is the part that appeals.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.