Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden

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Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden (1924) by Helen Louise Thorndyke ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is an adorable little book out of the Honey Bunch series. It is the fifth in the series out of thirty-four original books.

My copy has a lovely close-to-new inside with no markings and a dust cover. It was published by Grosset & Dunlap.

Little Honey Bunch (who is actually named Gertrude Marion Morton) is a little girl who is probably five or six, maybe seven years old. One day, her favorite uncle, Uncle Peter sent her some gardening tools, and this prompts Honey Bunch to decide to create a garden in the side yard.

When asked what kind of flowers she wanted to plant in her garden, she tells her mother that she wants to plant tulips. But her mother, Mrs. Morton, reminds Honey Bunch that she helped plant these in her mother’s garden in the fall. This was May. Tulips won’t flower in May! A few others were suggested by her father, but he was reminded that some of those take years to bloom, and Honey Bunch’s parents thought that it would be best to pick flowers that would bloom this season. After all, it was her first garden, and “‘No little gardener should be asked to cultivate patience her first season.”

She asks the washerwoman, Mrs. Miller, what her favorite thing to grow in the garden was. Mrs. Miller did not realize that she meant a flower, so she replied that she liked cabbage. When Honey Bunch clarified, Mrs. Miller told her that a cabbage rose is lovely to plant in the garden. Her little friend Ida Camp’s favorite flowers were red poppies. Another little friend, Norman Clark, liked sunflowers. Her mother liked heliotrope, She’d have nasturtiums, because that would be a flower that would bloom quickly, so she’d see results right away. Mother had said that Uncle Peter’s favorite flowers were pansies, so she’d plant those. Daddy would have clove pinks.

She soon meets a lady in a wheelchair, Mrs. Lancaster, who comes around to visit Honey Bunch most days, and she gives her a secret seed that only Honey Bunch and her mother would know what was — because girls always tell their mothers everything. When they bloomed, she would be able to tell everyone what kind of flower it was, because everyone would be able to tell by the flower. This was a very special seed, because her late husband had spent his life cultivating it. They turned out to be the prettiest snapdragons that anyone ever saw.

What’s that? You ask what Honey Bunch planted for her favorite flower? The fact was, that Honey Bunch thought all flowers were beautiful, and working hard in her garden every day for everyone’s favorite flowers was plenty enough for her!

Toward the end of the book, Uncle Peter suggests in a letter that Honey Bunch enter her flowers in a flower show if they have one near her, and that’s just what she does! She wins first prize in amateur class. The sunflowers she planted for Norman Clark won first prize for novelty class. She also wins the blue ribbon in children’s class. And, most of all, she wins Grand Prize of the Annual Flower Show of Barham! This prize was well deserved, because she had spent every day tending her flower garden and making sure her flowers were well cared for!

This was a beautiful read, though it did have some sexist things inside, indicating a sign-of-the-times. Here are a couple examples.

“Honey Bunch opened the package as soon as she was in the house. In it she found something dark blue with strings and funny little pockets stitched in a row across the bottom.
‘What is it, Daddy?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘It’s a garden apron, sweetheart,’ her daddy explained. ‘I wanted to get you overalls to wear while you were grubbing in the dirt, but Mother said no, she didn’t want her little girl turned into a little boy, even for make-believe.”

And when she received the money for her winnings in the flower show,

“Honey Bunch opened the box. Inside was pink cotton and on the pink cotton were three gold pieces. Honey Bunch knew they were gold pieces, for her uncle Peter sent her one every Christmas. Her mother put them in the bank for her and Honey Bunch was going to save them till some day she had enough to take her to college. She wanted to go to the same college that Uncle Peter went to, but if they wouldn’t have girls there, she said she would go to her mother’s college.”

The Honey Bunch series was one of many series geared toward children that was put out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. This company created series such as these and paid anonymous writers to write under a pseudonym, with the understanding that they were not to reveal their identity, relinquishing all rights to the stories. They were paid an average of $125 per book. Series such as Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, and so many others were created by this company and given the same treatment. This means that there is no Franklin W. Dixon, no Carolyn Keene, and no Laura Lee Hope. I recently learned this fact during my research of this series, and my mind was positively blown.

Regarding the Honey Bunch series, it is now known that author Josephine Lawrence wrote the first sixteen or seventeen Honey Bunch books between 1923-1936. Mildred Wirt Benson, who is now known to write some early Nancy Drew books, wrote the next five between 1937-1941, and the rest were written by unknown writers from 1942-1963.

I’d recommend this book to anyone at all, even adults, as this represents a lovely picture of early childhood and transports the reader back to when they were a child.