50 Books Like The Night Flower

I love to get kids excited about the night time and all the adventures that can be had when exploring the outdoors at night. Watching the moon is something kids can do even in a city filled with bright lights. This book focuses on the moon as the seasons go by, with the unique names for each full moon—Strawberry Moon, Cold Moon, Harvest Moon. Moon-gazing is the first step in getting kids to feel comfortable outdoors after the sun goes down.

I admit it, I’m a sucker for glow-in-the-dark books. I still have the glow-in-the-dark stars on the bedroom ceiling from when my own kids were small. This book has gorgeous glow-in-the-dark illustrations (it works best if you happen to have a blacklight bulb) but also has a lot of great information, facts, and thought-provoking questions about the lifestyles of nocturnal wildlife of all shapes and sizes. A fun reading experience for parents as well as kids!

This book is for slightly older kids who want to delve deeper into the mysteries of the night. I like this book because it includes plants in the survey of what’s going on at night. Plants often get overlooked, but they’re just as active at night as they are during the day—they don’t move around or make noise, but there’s a lot going on inside those quiet leaves. This book also covers humans, how our brain works, why it needs sleep, and does a good job of explaining the complex topic of biological rhythms.

This book really changed my life—it opened up the night skies and taught me the constellations in a simple kid-friendly way. Lots of fun cartoons make star-gazing surprisingly possible. Once I learned how to identify a few constellations, the night became a much friendlier palace, and instead of being scared of the dark, I began to realize the incredible beauty of the night. H. A. Rey really communicates his passion for star-gazing and makes you want to go out and night and explore the skies. And if the author’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s the creator of Curious George!

I bought this book for my daughter Ellen when she was 3 or 4 years old, and I think I was even more enchanted than she was! It's a wonderfully told and illustrated story about the animals that live in and around the giant saguaro cactuses in the deserts of the USA and Mexico. The pollinators are birds during the day and bats at night, and this book provides a child's-eye view of some of the science. Ellen is now 31...where does the time go?

Children are our future and the ways in which we influence them will have enormous consequences for the fate of our planet, including how we conserve bees, birds, bats, and other pollinators. Books such as this are so important – every child should have access to them, at home, at school, or in public libraries.

Hug Me depicts the story of Felipe, a young cactus, who just wants to be hugged. The problem is that his family just isn't the touchy-feely kind. It leads Felipe to go on his own path to find a friend. But hugging a cactus can be a tricky thing... This simple yet touching story will make you see the prickliest person as someone who also needs to be loved and hugged. I promise you, this cute little cactus will melt your heart!

This book has been my indoor plant bible for over thirty years. John Brookes is best known for linking indoor living spaces with outdoor gardens but here he turned his masterly design eye on houseplants. Yes, all the necessary practical information on a wide range of houseplants is here. But what really separates this book from the rest—and makes it completely ageless—is the photography which was so ahead of its time, it looks as though it was published last year. Interior shots with plant placement ideas with enough inspiration for the most demanding Instagram generation. What more could one need?

My first birding trip to the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona caught my fancy. Then I read this book, in which Dr. Nabhan recounts lively details of his encounters with Indigenous communities at home in the Sonoran Desert and learns how they engage with the desert plants and animals in their lives.

Nabhan is an astute observer, an intensely sympathetic storyteller, and a highly knowledgeable student of local natural history. In this book, he visits Tohono O’odham (Papago) friends as they harvest saguaro fruits to make an intoxicating brew to “bring on the rain.” He tells us about fiery wild chilis and bitter wild squashes that Coyote “shat upon.” End notes ground his vivid accounts in the academic literature.

I loved this road memoir by one of our most gentle and graceful writers, the poet Richard Shelton, who mentored hundreds of incarcerated writers in Arizona prisons.

He writes of a return to the “delightful maze” of the town of Bisbee, where he first worked as a teacher in 1956, a place where the old copper miner's shacks cling to the hillsides of the Mule Mountains as precariously as the villas on a Mediterranean island, and where the people have shrugged off life's hard punches as insouciantly as a prizefighter.

Resplendent with nature writing, you can practically smell the creosote on the sentences. I think this is one of the most tonally accurate volumes ever written about this region.

Much of Windling’s work as an editor has revolved around fairy tales and the power of story. The Wood Wife combines those with poetry and a tremendous love for the American Southwest (near Tucson, Arizona).

I love this book for the way it brings all those threads together and weaves them into something new, but something with long sturdy roots that anchor it in place, in time and history, and in both the personal and the mythical.