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Overview
In One Small Garden, Barbara Nichol brings together stories, memories, and botany to create a book that is as unique and lush as a summer garden. Here, plants from all over the world live and eventually die. Ants, raccoons, and a stray cat cross paths with a lost cockatoo who originated thousands of miles away. Stories and memories of people share space in the garden too.This is the perfect book for those who understand the enchantment and the wild-at-heart nature of the primmest garden. This is a book to treasure for the whole family.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
In One Small Garden, Barbara Nichol brings together stories, memories, and botany to create a book that is as unique and lush as a summer garden. Here, plants from all over the world live and eventually die. Ants, raccoons, and a stray cat cross paths with a lost cockatoo who originated thousands of miles away. Stories and memories of people share space in the garden too.
This is the perfect book for those who understand the enchantment and the wild-at-heart nature of the primmest garden. This is a book to treasure for the whole family.
Publishers Weekly
In a 100-year-old plot, growing beside a tiny house on a hidden city street, stories take root all centered around One Small Garden by Barbara Nichols, illus. by Barry Moser. The delicate watercolors provide fertile ground for the urban legends, gardening lore and tender tales about humanity's relationship with nature. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
In a 100-year-old plot, growing beside a tiny house on a hidden city street, stories take root all centered around One Small Garden by Barbara Nichols, illus. by Barry Moser. The delicate watercolors provide fertile ground for the urban legends, gardening lore and tender tales about humanity's relationship with nature. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Children's Literature
Small stories from just one paragraph to three-ages long dig into the life of a garden in Toronto, through the masked eyes of raccoons and the ruminations of tree experts. The lives of small creatures weave in and through the luxurious growth of mulberry and cabbages, and the human stories call to mind the experiences we've all had with swings, ants, and climbing trees. A question, though, is who Nichol envisions as readers. Here are little stories from adult memory, the kind told over and over again to the young of the family about themselves as children, while occasional asides from science class speak to the child who has yet to discover botany and may not know how plants grow. However, just like a pleasant hour working in the garden itself, the adult and child who linger together in this small book will spend a pleasant hour sharing the kind of stories that, just as the author experienced, remind one of another story, another garden to be shared. Moser's translucent watercolors deepen the sense of the garden, with cats, little girls, silken blooms and sturdy trunks vividly adding detail to imagined scenes. 2004 (orig. 2001), Tundra Books, Ages 8 to 12.—Diane Carver Sekeres
School Library Journal
Gr 3-6-In simple, poetic prose, Nichol traces the small but significant moments in the history of a garden tucked away in Toronto, Canada. Resembling journal entries, the book's passages range from advice on watering to vignettes of stray cats to commentary on the changing face of the neighborhood. The story of a maple tree is a thread that runs through several entries, adding cohesiveness to what sometimes feels like random impressions. The author never reveals her connection to this particular green space, which creates both a sense of detachment and an appreciation for the universality of the experience. Moser's lovely watercolors appear on nearly every page, showing a blossom, a wandering animal, and the like. Only the most introspective children who require little action will gravitate to this book, but it provides excellent examples of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and may be used to promote youngsters' own journal and memoir efforts.-Ellen Heath, Orchard School, Ridgewood, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Nichol (Trunks All Aboard, not reviewed, etc.) wields a glorious simplicity of language to tell a few true stories and impart a lot of natural history about a garden in the city of Toronto. That glorious simplicity is matched by the radiance of Moser's (Sit, Truman, p. 1026, etc.) watercolors, where every leaf and petal is rendered in exquisite detail and every cat and raccoon face looks familiar. There are 12 chapters, each further subdivided, so that every section is quite brief and some loop back again to complete a story started earlier. Readers meet the raccoon family and the line of ants on the maple tree by the garden gate in the very first chapter, and their fates and histories come round again at the end. They meet the poisoned gardener who sprayed so much that he vanished as well as the pests. They'll see the mulberry tree roots and learn the difference between annuals and perennials. There's Butch the cat and his house, Marjorie who climbed a tree, and Sarah who saw a bear. All of these parts make such an attractive package, to be read eagerly by youngsters entranced by growing things (including themselves). Small print might slow some folks down, but it lends itself to being read aloud, so the rhythm of weeding, watering, mowing, and feeding can be heard by more reluctant readers. A lovely, personal look at nature. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Book Details
Published
February 1, 2004
Publisher
Tundra
Pages
56
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780887766879