This picture appeared in The Golden Book of Famous Women (1919) as an illustration to Spenser's The Faerie Queene:

A lovely lady rode him fair beside Upon a lowly ass more white than snow

Hiding from a 'hideous storme' in a 'shadie grove' are Princess Una, her protector the Red Cross Knight and, lagging behind, a dwarf 'wearied with bearing of her bag'. The three travellers find shelter beneath 'loftie trees' like the kingly oaks, cedars 'proud and tall' and this, the 'vine-prop Elme', around which serpent-like vines twist.

While the focus of Brickdale's book is famous women throughout history and literature — from Cleopatra to Hester Prynne — the gnarled tree, painted in painstaking detail, dominates the scene. In subject matter, style and spirit, Brickdale's work resembled that of her Pre-Raphaelite predecessors, and like them, she would have drawn this tree, or elements of it, from life. She 'was always a welcome guest in the houses of her many friends whose houses and gardens or the surrounding countryside appear as backgrounds in her pictures' (Ashmolean, catalogue to Centenary Exhibition of Works by Fortescue-Brickdale, 1972). Her older brother's home at Newland in the Forest of Dean was a regular refuge and, perhaps, the inspiration for this woodland.

The year after The Golden Book's publication in 1919, the original watercolour was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, alongside Brickdale's illustrations of other famous women like St. Catherine and Petrarch's Laura.