Editor’s Note: This is from Janet Bord’s superlative Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People, a book we’ve raved about elsewhere on this site. Thanks to Janet for giving us permission to use the extract.

A friend of mine [Janet Bord’s] also saw a nature spirit in a rose garden. Sylvia Pigeon was cutting roses in her garden in Hampshire when she looked down and saw a figure on the ground. ‘It was all sort of greenish, and light – light, airy – and I have a vague recollection of seeing a little sort of face of some kind, but I have no recollection of any limbs, any arms or any legs, but it was round in some way, and moving, very sort of carefully, almost as though it was looking where it was going.’ It was about twelve to eighteen inches tall, ‘misty and leaflike… it really seemed to me to be a spirit of the roses, and there were some draperies about it, but it was more like petals, you know curved and interwined, and flowing.’ At the time she saw the creature, Mrs Pigeon was thinking about the imminent wedding of her daughter, and the beauty of the roses, and she felt that somehow the appearance of the creature, the wedding and the roses were all linked. She felt ‘love and compassion’ coming from the creature, that it was ‘looking at me with some delight, I would say, some sort of love, friendliness, as though to say yes, how nice it is all is, all friends together, I had a feeling of loveliness and love really (53).