Tasha Tudor was Everyman’s image of a purveyor of children’s books, as one commentator put it: “giving children a very special ray of sunshine” and thereby sanctioning such dismissive descriptions of the genre as “kiddylit”. Not so though for Everywoman. Tudor’s lifelong exploitation of her capacity to create scenes from a bland, but peaceable, kingdom all her own won her a huge and devoted following among the girls, mothers and grandmothers of Middle America.

New England to the core, Tudor was born Starling Burgess in Boston in 1915; the later name which she eventually registered by deed poll came from her father’s liking for Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and from her mother’s maiden name.

These parents divorced when she was 9 and her girlhood was spent in conditions of joyous freedom under the eye of sympathetic relatives. She was attracted early to art and handicraft (and is said to have sold drawings to her schoolmates at 25 cents a time), and through an encounter with Hugh Thompson’s drawings for The Vicar of Wakefield she saw a future for herself as an illustrator.

She had almost no formal training and in 1938 achieved her first success with a little book written by herself, Pumpkin Moonshine. This story of a little girl going into the fields to collect a giant pumpkin impressed readers chiefly through its charming production: a miniature “stocking book” bound in calico (the material that Tudor had used for her dummy), and it was to be the first of a series in the same style which came to be known as “the calico books”. The series culminated in the nursery anthology Mother Goose (1944), which was shortlisted for the American Library Association’s picture-book prize, the Caldecott Medal.

Tudor had been helped towards the publication of her first book by Thomas McCready, whom she married in 1938, and after the success of Mother Goose they bought a 450acre farm in New Hampshire where their four children (who often featured in her books) were brought up.

Her husband collaborated with her on one or two of her early books, but the partnership did not last (he did not care too much for her liking for rural self-sufficiency), and although she was briefly married again she became more and more absorbed by a reconstructive interest in the New England of the 1830s — the time of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, when Louisa May Alcott was growing up and Thoreau was revolving thoughts that would take him to Walden Pond. She sought to live a life dependent on what she could make or produce on the farm — a telephone and a car being excepted.

Presumably the implements of her art were also exceptions, for she worked continuously on different ideas for children’s books, eventually producing about 80 or so titles. These included simple picture books, sanitised versions of traditional tales, poetry anthologies, little volumes of prayers and graces, pop-up books and doll stories, and stories in rustic settings, usually involving animals. (Her own favourite, rather panned by the critics, was Corgiville Fair of 1971, where animals stood in for human beings in a traditional New England country fair.)

She also illustrated a number of books for adults on such subjects as cookery and gardening and, like other illustrators of her kind on both sides of the Atlantic, a much-appreciated, and now collected, range of picture post-cards and Christmas cards.

Tudor exploited a homely pastoralism in the making of her books, whether in the monochrome vignettes for classics such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden — published with “a packaged charm” — or in her many picture books, whose watercolour scenes often sported decorative borders of flowers, leaves and objets trouvés. (A notable example — discounting rhymes of the order of “One is one duckling, swimming in a dish. / Two is two sisters, making a wish. . . ” — was the counting book 1 is One which was shortlisted for the Caldecott Medal for 1956. But, as the years went by, critical opinion regarded her as doing little more than recycling favourite ideas and techniques and it was her carefully nurtured fan club that greeted each new offering with enthusiasm. At present a Tasha Tudor Museum is in prospect.

Commentators have often compared her work to that of Kate Greenaway, if for no better reason than that it exists in a time warp all its own. She herself, though, confessed to being “ardently devoted” to the work of Beatrix Potter and in 1949 had, with her husband, established a gift-shop and doll museum named after Potter’s cat and dog shopkeepers Ginger and Pickles. In 1957 she made contact with Leslie Linder, the great authority on, and collector of, the work of Beatrix Potter and this resulted in a visit to England to see his collection.

It proved to be one of the highlights of her life, and led to an extended correspondence with Linder and his sister in which Tudor composed delightful letters modelled on the miniature letters that Potter sent to her child friends. These were the subject of an exhibition held at Book Trust in Wandsworth in 2004 where the curator noted that Tudor (whose work has been little published in Britain) engaged in a “stylistic and rather conventional portrayal of animals”, which contrasted with the freshness and originality of Potter’s work.

In 1971 Tudor moved across the New Hampshire border to Vermont to live in a house built by her son Seth as a facsimile of an 18th-century American home. Her work continued unabated, with a marketing company being set up in 1999. Her last book, a return to Corgiville in Corgiville Christmas, was published in 2003.

She is survived by her four children.

Tasha Tudor, writer and illustrator, was born on August 28, 1915. She died on June 19, 2008, aged 92