Group Garden: Thank You, Garden Liz Garton Scanlon

GARDEN NEW.

WORK TO DO.

In a community garden there are four garden plots, centered by a big table, providing a place for a variety of people to plant their own garden--a plumpish grandmother with two playful kids, an aproned mom with more kids, a dad with yet more kids, and lots of holes to be dug--tiny holes for seeds from a packet, medium holes for tomato seedlings, and larger ones for leafy greens and lettuce and cabbage heads. Even critters turn up--a frog, a worm, and busy bees, each with garden work to do, too.

GARDEN DIG AND GARDEN PLAY.

GARDEN FILLING UP THE DAY.

There's dirt and sprinkles of water that kids discover make--MUD! And then there's the long wait for earth and sky and water and love to do its thing!

Sometimes it's rainy, then hot and dry, but all the time gardens soak up the sky.

And the garden grows, along with the kids, and finally between them fills the table with its products. It's done it's best!

GARDEN, YES!

The allegorical experience of growing food with and for others is told in soft couplets, each one beginning with the word "GARDEN," in the award-winning author Liz Garton Scanlon's latest, Thank You, Garden. The figurative artwork by Simone Shin testifies to the symbolic aspect of this picture book about one of the humans' oldest survival skills. Beginning with empty holes and concluding with a group feast, this salute to spring and the growing season has a primitive feeling to it, showing what humans do: work together, produce products of their shared labors, and enjoy the festive flowering and fruits of it all together.

Share this one with Scanlon's Caldecott book, All the World (see my review here).