Cobble Hill - Country Diary: Autumn 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A page from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, reproduced at puzzle size, hand lettering and all. Edith Holden kept this nature diary through 1906, painting what she saw month by month and writing the names beside it. It sat unpublished for seventy years and became one of the best selling books of the 1970s.

What you are looking at

The Autumn plate. In the centre, a starling in full iridescent plumage standing on a river bank with a pale wash of water and far trees behind. Around it, on a cream ground, the season laid out and labelled in Holden's own italic hand: house sparrows on oats, a yellow bunting, rose hips, sloes, blackberries on the bramble, a common red poppy, a rowan, mushrooms and bracket fungi, ragwort, goldenrod, hazelnuts, and horse chestnuts still in the shell. Every specimen is annotated.

What it is like to build

The cream background is the whole difficulty and there is a lot of it. Unlike a sky, it has no gradient at all, so tone will not help you. What will help is the hand lettering: the labels are scattered across the cream in a warm brown ink, so a piece with any ink on it can be placed by reading the letters.

Work outside in. Do the border, then every specimen as its own small island, because each one is a distinct colour and shape. Then the starling and the water panel in the middle. Then place every piece carrying a letter. What is left is blank cream, and that part goes in purely by shape, which is exactly where a random cut earns its money.

Why the Cobble Hill cut is different

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut rather than a grid: irregular shapes, no rows, no two pieces alike. On several hundred pieces of identical cream that is not a detail, it is the only remaining signal. Linen print texture on the board. Do not try to count the pieces before you start, a random cut does not count out neatly.

Specifications

A little context

Botanical and natural history plates are a proper fine art seam in this category and one of the pillars we buy for, alongside difficulty and large piece counts. They finish as something you would actually frame, which most puzzles do not, and the Edwardian Lady is the best known of them in the English-speaking world. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

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