Gift Books for Younger Gardeners

This year we begin with something very special.  When you were a child, did you have beautifully illustrated anthologies of poetry from which you learned rhyme, meter, metaphor, and dreams?  I know I did, and we memorized poetry every week at school.

This year’s most treasured (by me) gift is Sing a Song of Seasons, illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon and featuring a poem for each day of the year, selected by Fiona Waters.  Ogden Nash, Ted Hughes, Christina Rosetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake, Sara Teasdale, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, translations from Navajo and Japanese and Paiute and Hungarian – there is a magnificent world here for people of all ages, and I assure you my copy will not be given away to a mere child;  I shall continue to read it every day with great pleasure.  And I find a new thought every day when I read – like, “how in the world did I manage until I was eighteen years old, without having read William Carlos Williams ---"

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

A translation of Gerda Muller’s A Year in Our New Garden joins the recent ranks of books for child gardeners, about a family that moves to a new home in the city with a run-down walled yard. Benjamin and Anna and their neighbor Louis in the apartment house next door share experiences planting, harvesting, watching baby birds grow up, eating their potatoes and the apples from their renewal-pruned ancient tree, making snowmen, and waking in spring to find the bulbs they planted in the fall greeting a new growing season.  This is another of those beautiful tales of children discovering what a garden can be, and how to live in it.  The illustrations and story teach how to sow seeds, make lemonade, create a compost bed, and share the joys and the fruits of their labor.

Magnificently illustrated by Jing Jing Tsong, Verlie Hutchens’s Trees introduces young children to different species of trees by character.  “Willow dances in her narrow kimono….Dogwood bows beside the walk, welcoming the guests….Sequoia holds memories for the Tribe of Trees, telling tales from another age…”  If you don’t mind a little anthropomorphism with your tales of trees, this is a magical little book to set a child’s imagination spinning.

As I recall, I had begun reading classic English mysteries by the time I was ten years old;  certainly I was reading Ian’s Fleming’s spy novels at eleven (although not understanding quite exactly what James Bond was up to all of the time).  For children entering their teens, it’s probably time to turn them loose on some classic garden mysteries.  Perhaps you’d like to try them on Anthony Eglin, whose sleuth is Lawrence Kingston, a retired botany professor?  Their eyes might be wide open when considering the botanical surprises of The Blue Rose or the archaeological oddities of The Lost Gardens.  The adult plots allow the botany and garden history lessons to slip by under the radar. Check Amazon’s brief reviews first to be sure these will work for your older children.

 Finally, I recommend to readers of all ages a terrific study of nature, The Lost Words, written by a Cambridge don, Robert MacFarlane, and illustrated dramatically, and also botanically correctly, by Jackie Morris.  MacFarlane open his book with a brilliant premise, which I shall quote here because there is no better way to do it justice.

 “Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first no one noticed – fading away like water on a stone.  The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them:  acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker – gone!  Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow wren…all of them gone!  The words were becoming lost, no longer vivid in children’s voices, no longer alive in their stories.

“You hold in your hands a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words.”

This last is another book I shall never give away, because it truly is magical.  It returns to us the freedom of playing in nature that we learned splashing through creeks and climbing trees as children and, on sniffly days spent at home with a cold, those experiences we shared with adventurous children in beloved books.  It returns us to our first glimpse of a mink, the first time we heard a meadowlark sing, the first time we blew apart the seedhead of a dandelion.  And for those of us lucky to have children and grandchildren, it reminds us to teach them how to spot a salamander in that creek and mimic the call of a barred owl in those trees, and to share the magic of nature.