“At the end of her notebook Ham wrote. underlined “We must not gild the lily.” Yes, yes, I know, probably from the Bible. And I know exactly what she meant - that we’ve tried to make the meadow into a garden, change the thicket into a park, tame the shore with a dock, and all the other things we’ve undeniably done wrong. Okay, we make mistakes. What of it? Sometimes it felt like unrequited love - everything exagerated. I had the feling that this immoderately pampered and badly treated island was a living thing that didn’t like us, or felt sorry for us, depending on the way we behaved, or iust because.”

—Tove Jansson