The Flower-Patch Among the Hills

Emily Flora Klickmann was an English journalist, author, and editor. She was the second editor of the Girl's Own Paper, but she is best known for her Flower-Patch books of tales, autobiography, and natural descriptions. Flora Klickmann was born on January 26, 1867, in Brixton, London, the sixth child of German-born Rudolf Klickmann and his wife, Fanny Warne. Flora's family relocated to Sydenham, south London, when she was a teenager. She wanted to be a concert pianist and studied at Trinity College of Music and the Royal College of Organists. However, she was diagnosed with arrhythmia and ordered to rest. At the age of 21, she began writing about music for Sylvia's Home Journal and other women's magazines, and by 1895, she was submitting stories and interviews with musicians to The Windsor Magazine, one of the most well-known fiction periodicals of the time. Her mother died in 1903, while they lived on Ondine Road in East Dulwich, and her Prussian-born father, Rudolph Klickmann, remarried in 1908 and moved to Battersea with his new wife, a Russian emigre. Flora lived in the property in Dulwich till she married.