100 Books Like The Busy Busy Day

Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms is a delightful heart-warming tale full of what to expect when the seasons change to spring. You can’t help but smile at Fletcher the Fox who mistakenly thinks the falling blossom is surprising spring snow so warns the other animals that it is going to get cold and the birds should fly south, find shelter, or go back into hibernation. 

This picture book is the ideal mix of a funny, entertaining story and glorious watercolour illustrations that demonstrate how nature is transformed by the changing seasons. I particularly like the double-page spread showing how the woods have been transformed by a blanket of pink and white petals. Great for use in the classroom or reading aloud at home with your child.

Abracadabra, It's Spring! shows seasonal magic at its height. The charming rhymes and lyrical nature of the text transports the readers on a magical journey of seasonal changes. Each page opens out to double the size by the addition of beautifully illustrated pull-out flaps. This is a great picture book for young children as it visually shows how the winter snow magically melts away to reveal the thrill and wonder of spring’s arrival.

I particularly like how it provides opportunities to discuss bird migration and the life cycle of birds and butterflies. You can also have fun brainstorming all the different activities they can do during the spring when the weather gets warmer. A great addition to a spring-themed bookshelf.

The unique style of this picture book is a pleasure to read aloud. You can use different voices as the young boy walks through the countryside with his dog and says goodbye to each of the signs of winter and then how the seasons reply. In effect, you get this wonderful conversation between nature and the boy from the birds chirping in the branches, to the ice melting on the babbling brook.

Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring is the ideal book for highlighting the dramatic contrasts between the season of winter and spring. The perfect choice for a fun storytime themed around the seasons.

Little Bear's Spring is an inspired picture book about friendship that emerges from the unlikeliest of things. When Little Bear wakes up from his long winter sleep he discovers everywhere is covered by a blanket of snow and is eerily quiet. He feels alone and afraid. You can’t help but go Ahhhh when Little Bear picks up a small pebble which he thinks is just as alone as he is. He clutches it tightly in his paw and sets off on this heart-warming adventure in search of friends.

You can really identify with Little Bear as he wonders at the magnificent changes the seasons have on his environment. This caring picture book is a celebration of how amazing the natural world is.

Derwood the Goat is a fussy farmer who grumpily guards his garden against dandelions, pigweed, crabgrass, sapsuckers, and all manner of invaders, especially rabbits. So, when he catches a cute little bunny named Tabitha nosing around his vegetables, he’s very suspicious, and very crabby. Tabitha has one excuse after another, all delivered in delightfully pun-filled banter with Derwood, who’s having none of it. Tabitha finally offers to weed the garden while the exhausted Derwood dozes off in his rocking chair. When Derwood wakes up, the weeding is done, and he rewards Tabitha by sharing his harvest with her. In the end, everybody gets what they wanted: food, friendship, and nonstop nibbling. I love this story because it shows how humor, conversation, and cooperation can turn adversaries into friends.

A hands-on, child’s-eye-view of what it takes to grow your own food in which the main character, a young girl, works to prove to her parents that she is ready for the responsibility and hard work of gardening.

The author uses a combination of prose and diary entries to tell this story of perseverance, entrepreneurship, and agriculture—all big words described in a very child-friendly way. But it’s the illustrations that sell this book. I love the bright, scrapbook style. They add tons of humor and kid appeal while perfectly complimenting the writing.

I imagine kiddos spending hours pouring over the art's details, and using the illustrations as inspiration to create their own writing notebooks.

Gardening is indeed an obsession, which can drive men and women to madness and penury. It is fuelled by competition, the desire to have the latest, most exotic specimen. Andrea Wulf captures beautifully the mania for American plants which swept across English gardens in the 1700s, as the plant-hunter John Bartram of Virginia teamed up with the London merchant, Peter Collinson, to import boxes of plants and seeds into the UK. If they survived the long sea voyage, they were then nurtured by English aristocrats and their head gardeners, at vast expense, before becoming so common that few gardeners in Europe today know where they came from.

What I loved most about Ashley Wolff’s How to Help a Pumpkin Grow was her color! This luscious book is filled with gorgeous, intense full-spectrum color! Wolff’s wet on wet washes flow seamlessly into each other as a base layer. I am guessing, there may be some smooth pastel added to enhance the color in places. Wolff’s adept painting skill brings out details with multi-colored painted line work on top of the washes. 

Unusual touches like the addition of saturated royal blue to highlight the black coat of the dog and crow feathers add an interesting pop of color. The great asset of acrylic gouache is that it can be both transparent or opaque, enabling Wolff to add light line work on top of dark washes.

Gorgeous work, Ashley Wolff!

The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is an invaluable gardening resource, especially for those of us who live in the northern climates. Nova Scotia-based author Niki Jabbour proves firsthand that it is possible to grow all kinds of vegetables in even the coldest of areas. Her cold frames from which she plucks handfuls of carrots and leafy greens when they’re buried in snow are reason enough to buy this book.

Garden history is largely written about the gardens of the rich and famous, kings, queens, and aristocrats, But most of the population, in many countries, have small gardens, balconies, and window-boxes and tend them as lovingly as do the paid gardeners of the rich. Margaret Willes uncovers their history in Britain over five centuries; it is a difficult task because most working-class gardeners left few or no documentary records, but she succeeds triumphantly. Gardening societies, at which they showed off their prize fruit and vegetables, allotments, the garden cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all have their place, together with the archetypal cottage garden with roses around the door.