Secret Gardeners: Growing a Community and Healing the Earth
Secret Gardeners: Growing a Community and Healing the Earth
“Gardening is a lot of work,” Luna says.
“Yes, but it’s fun to grow your own food,” Amy replies, “and it’s good for the climate if we do it in the right way. But people would need to do it all over the world.”
“The entire planet?” Luna exclaims. “Are people growing food like this in other places?”
“Yes,” says Amy. “There are no-dig gardens and farms. There are people who garden in old car tires and barrels on abandoned lots in the middle of the city.” (p.16)
Every once in a while I get to review a book that makes my heart sing. Secret Gardeners: Growing a Community and Healing the Earth is one of those books.
Don’t be deceived by the storybook look of this book. It is a gentle story of three young children discovering the world of gardening and the magic of working together to grow food and create a community, but it is so much more.
Bianca, Billy, and Luna like to watch their neighbours. They accidentally discover Amy, “the lady who pushes around a stroller filled with buckets and says, ‘Good day, hello there’ to everyone” (p. 6) as she is secretly preparing a garden bed.
With permission from their parents, Luna, Billy, and Bianca help Amy create a garden in an abandoned city lot. Along the way, the children - and their adults - learn about no-dig gardening, soil, microbes, seeds, pollinators, and more. Other neighbours become involved in the project, and all is going well until people discover that a parking lot is scheduled to be built on the garden lot. Fortunately, the community comes together and, with the help of José, “the sad old man” in the children’s apartment building, the garden is saved.
On its own merit, Secret Gardeners is a well-written story about how gardening can build community and can add quality to the earth and the world.
The added value to this story is the rich nonfiction content that is naturally integrated into the story.
From the moment the children meet their first adult, Amy, text boxes begin to appear, first explaining what no-dig gardening is, then laying out the steps to take to create a garden.
1. Amy measures out an area for the garden bed. The children chop down all the bigger plants. The roots can stay in the ground.
2. Amy digs up a small shovelful of dirt and feels it with her hand. It’s pretty hard so she uses a gardening fork to make air holes in the ground. This loosens up the soil. (p.13)
The pencil crayon art work beautifully combines the fictional story of three children with all the relevant information that an adult will need as they support novice gardeners. Even the double page spread with text boxes explaining composting and how to sow a seed is illustrated showing Luna, Bianca, and Amy hard at work. The story is not interrupted by the factual information. Other pages combine the fictional story and the nonfiction support material showing the whole local community hard at work in what is now a community garden.
As with most nonfiction books, Secret Gardeners includes a Table of Contents: Gardening Without Digging; Life Under the Surface; Composting; Sow a Seed; and In the Beehive. There is also a good Appendix and Glossary. Even the end papers add value with illustrations of a variety of different seeds showing their size, shape, and colour.
The Appendix, titled “The More You Know…”, includes an age appropriate description of “The Reason Everyone’s Talking About Carbon Dioxide”, “Bokashi” (a Japanese word that loosely translates to “fermented organic matter”), “The Importance of Pollination”, and “The Honeybee Apis Mellifera”.
Caring, sharing, collective activism, empathy, all wrapped around a story of children learning about gardening. Secret Gardeners: Growing a Community and Healing the Earth deserves to be read and shared widely. It is hard to imagine a better way for parents, caregivers, schools, and public libraries to invest in the future.
Suzanne Pierson, a retired teacher librarian and library course instructor, tends her Little Free Library in Prince Edward County, Ontario, for the enjoyment of her friends and neighbours of all ages.