The Garden Gang – The Ellery Yale Wood Collection of Children’s Books and Young Adult Literature

Imagine you’re a young girl in England in the late 1970s. You’re an accomplished musician, you sew and bake, play chess, breed stick insects, and keep a garden. What else do you do with your time?

Well, if you’re Jayne Fisher, you write and illustrate your own series of children’s books!

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Jayne Fisher wrote fourteen Garden Gang books between 1979 and 1983 (there was also an annual titled Meet the Garden Gang, and two Garden Gang coloring books). Each small book has two stories about anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables living in a community and going about their daily lives. The characters and plots in these stories are simple and charming.

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Jayne was only nine years old when she began writing the Garden Gang stories, and while she was prolific for that short period of time, it does not seem like she pursued her writing career much further. There are countless blog and forum posts across the internet expressing fondness for the series and wondering “what ever happened to Jayne Fisher?”

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In a way, I like that while the series was so popular and beloved, this child author then went on to pursue other interests and talents. I hold out hope that Jayne Fisher might resurface at some point, simply because there is a question that has been bugging me: all of the characters in the Garden Gang have alliterative names, save one. What’s the deal with Penelope Strawberry? Did she change her name to sound more glamorous (it seems like something she might do)? Is “Penelope” her middle name and her first name is actually “Sarah” or “Sally” or another name that begins with S? I don’t think I’ll ever find out, but I will always wonder.

– Rayna Andrews (BMC 2011), Project Coordinator