Green Thumbs Up

Simple experiments and activities introduce the concepts of how plants grow and what affects their growth.

To make a new city feel like home, Anna gets involved with a community garden—and cultivates new friendships as well as flowers and vegetables—in the first book in the Friendship Garden series. It may be the orange and red season of fall, but eight-year-old Anna Fincher feels nothing but gray. She and her family have just moved to Chicago for her mom’s new job. Not only does Anna miss her tiny hometown and her true-blue best friends, but she misses her garden. Over the summer she and her friends had been growing big red tomatoes, bright green beans, and pink raspberries on a small plot of land in Anna’s backyard. Now, just when it’s fall harvest time back home, Anna is stuck in a boring apartment with no yard, and starting a brand-new school with kids who are anything but friendly. Until one day Anna makes an amazing discovery: a little community garden right in the middle of the city. And a small idea begins to take root in a big way. What if a bunch of kids took over a neglected, forgotten little garden plot? Could they make anything bloom—even friendship?

Budding gardeners will learn what it takes to make things grow with fun activities that require only readily available materials.

Where Tristou touches, flowers grow. He makes flowers grow in slums, prisons, and hospitals. His masterpiece: he causes the guns to shoot flowers and a senseless war is ended. It is then that the people discover he was an angel.

When Mrs. Alonzo is looking for the kids who trampled her prized garden, Beast and Emily use luck and gardening know-how to get themselves off the hook.

The creator of Instagram’s House Plant Journal mixes love with scientific logic in this beautifully photographed guide for indoor gardeners. For indoor gardeners everywhere, Darryl Cheng offers a new way to grow healthy house plants. He teaches the art of understanding a plant’s needs and giving it a home with the right balance of light, water, and nutrients. With this book, indoor gardeners can be less a passive follower of rules for the care of each species and much more the confident, active grower, relying on observation and insight. And in the process, the plant owner becomes a plant lover, bonded to these beautiful living things by a simple love and appreciation of nature. The New Plant Parent covers all of the basics of growing house plants, from finding the right light, to everyday care like watering and fertilizing, to containers, to recommended species. Cheng’s friendly tone, personal stories, and accessible photographs fill his book with the same generous spirit that has made @houseplantjournal, his Instagram account, a popular source of advice and inspiration for over half a million indoor gardeners.

Little Brown Bear must learn how to stop sucking his thumb in this eBook.