After All These Years!!

For years now, almost 2 decades, I've been trying to remember the title of a children's book I loved as a kid.  I couldn't remember the title of the book, the names of the characters, or most of the plot.  All I could remember of the plot was that there was a man looking for a flower which would save the woman he loved and he finds it growing amongst some rocks.  And this picture is what has stayed in my memory for all these years:

That, and I remembered the flower so well because there was a closeup of it on the page before:

Pretty, isn't it?

A few days ago I decided to search for the book online, but I didn't have much to go on.  After a couple of hours spent doing a Google search for "rose with pearl in the middle" I changed my search to "flower with pearl" and came across an excerpt from a collection of stories and I knew this was what I was looking for!

It is a German fairytale by the Grimm Brothers called "Jorinde und Joringel".  I was so happy!  But all I could find was the original fairytale in a collection of other Grimm fairy tales, and I was certain that as a kid I had read a stand-alone book (and I knew I had read it in English!).

So then Part 2 of my search was to find the stand-alone book I had read as a kid.  After about an hour I found this on Amazon.com and I was SO excited because this is the book!

After literally decades of wondering in what book I had seen that flower, I finally found it!  I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon.com and it arrived today.  The pictures are lovely, the story is captivating and interesting, and that flower is beautiful.  Joy!!