Jewell Stoddard had a green thumb. A gardener extraordinaire, she and husband Ted created a woodland glade behind their home in suburban Maryland.

Jewell and Ted, along with sons Philip and Andrew, became our lifelong family friends when Phil and my brother Don were in nursery school together. My mother taught first grade at the school; later, Jewell taught third. Experiential learning, with nature as lead teacher, was part of the curriculum at the eponymously named Green Acres School.

Jewell was Mother Nature. She and my mother roamed country waysides on hot August days as she taught Mom to find monarch butterfly eggs and the striped threads of tiny caterpillars on milkweed. Just before school began, caterpillars and eggs were carried back to Green Acres and installed in a screened indoor habitat complete with water, milkweed, and a tall branch.

Students watched the eggs hatch and the caterpillars devour bushels of milkweed and then poop — “frazz” being the scientific term (what a perfect swear). Plumped-up caterpillars ascended the branch, attached, dangled, drooped, and finally split open to reveal jade green chrysalises. For days, spellbound children hovered. The butterflies emerged damp and creased. Once the monarchs were dry and flight-ready, kids and teachers released them for their epic migration.

The tradition Jewell began continues more than 60 years on at Green Acres, but wonder is now shadowed with worry. Monarchs’ fascinating lifecycle and migration are now well known and better understood, but the butterflies face multiple threats and grow scarcer.

Jewell herself metamorphized, in 1977, from educator to bookseller. With several teacher colleagues, she founded the Cheshire Cat in Washington, DC, the first bookstore in the United States dedicated to children’s books. The shop was homey. Kids curled up in the “rabbit hole” to read and dream. Every September, the window featured a living display of monarchs-in-process.

Jewell became an internationally recognized expert on children’s literature, sitting on juries for the Caldecott and Newbery awards, editing anthologies, welcoming author friends like Tomie dePaola, Brian Jacques, and Beverly Cleary for book talks in the shop. (Standing-room only for grown-ups, kids at the front, sardined in, cross-legged on the floor.)

Really, she remained a teacher, growing readers. Cultivation started early — with my first child still in utero. The shower gift Jewell and her colleagues presented was a large carton wrapped in a collage of children’s book covers. The contents? Guess.

Books. Board books, picture books, traditional and modern classics for older kids. A nature book for parents and kids to share, Gerald Durrell’s Amateur Naturalist. A guidebook for parents, Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook. Surely, the Trelease was Jewell’s bootlegged advance review copy; the 1982 first edition wasn’t published until three months after my baby arrived. Although I’d opted to be surprised by what flavor of baby I was carrying, Jewell somehow knew. Period: A Girl’s Guide came in handy years later.

Prescience and intuition were among Jewell’s magical powers. Deeply informed by reading and study, she also had an uncanny knack for matching book to child, whether eager or reluctant reader. On quiet days, she consulted with kids or parents, intuiting the right book. She stocked classics from E. Nesbit to E.B. White but was no snob. The collection was eclectic. Her goal? Hook a kid with good stuff, no matter the genre. Wren to the Rescue, first in the fantasy series by Sherwood Smith, opened the way to pleasure reading for one of our kids.

Jewell was a reader and also a multitasker. Ted read aloud while she prepared world-class meals (a romantic, practical gesture by a gallant gentleman with a good dinner in store). Once or twice, after I’d started writing, I had the pleasure of reading my own work aloud to her.

The first time, 10 years ago, was when I was presenting my debut novel at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. A dream come true, though my dream hadn’t included a torrential downpour at the outdoor event. Festival organizers equipped participants with souvenir umbrellas; I slogged to my station. A hardy handful found my soggy tent and perched on damp metal folding chairs. Nervous, I checked my notes. Just as I looked up, Jewell and Ted (84 and 89, respectively) waded in. Good to have a spare mother, as Anne Tyler once said.

The final time I read to Jewell was just last month. She, Ted, Andy, and his family had moved to a house in the suburban woods with room for Phil and his family, too. Jewell had entered hospice. Among family, watching birds through big windows, she was happier than she’d been over the several previous, difficult years.

I’d brought a book Mom purchased at the Cheshire Cat, inscribed to me as a birthday gift in 1985, an addition to my shelf of children’s books (my second baby was on the way). Annie and the Old One by Miska Miles is a short story for older children illustrated by Peter Parnall. In it, an elderly Navajo weaver is ready to pass her shuttle onto her 10-year-old granddaughter. But Annie knows this means goodbye and refuses to take it. Over a few days together, she becomes reconciled to learning to weave and letting her grandmother go. The night before my mother died 24 years ago, in hospice at home with us, our third and youngest child, almost 11, read Annie to her.

The final time I read to Jewell, I sat close to her. She listened and looked. Ted murmured appreciation. Afterward, Jewell took the book, stroking the Newbery Honor medallion on its cover. “Well,” she said tartly, “at least they gave it a silver.” She would’ve worked that jury over.

Last week, friends and family gathered for a potluck picnic to remember Jewell. There were reminiscences, a reading from Charlotte’s Web. Phil shared one of her favorite dirty limericks — divulging that she’d kept a secret file in the back room of the shop. Woodpeckers drilled. Birds sang. The first gnats of the season swarmed.

A good time was had by all at Jewell’s farewell party.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Blogging as “Girl Writing” in the Independent bi-monthly, she lives in Washington, DC. For many years, Ellen practiced psychotherapy. Her new novel, Vanishing Point, will appear next month.