By Dianna Hutts Aston
The one where a seed is sleepy, secretive, adventurous, and a dozen other things, told in a single poetic line per page over the most beautiful botanical paintings.
Each spread starts the same lovely way: 'A seed is sleepy.' 'A seed is secretive.' 'A seed is naked.' Then, in smaller handwriting tucked around Sylvia Long's watercolors, comes the real science, how a seed waits underground for its moment, how some hide inside a fruit, how a coconut can float across an ocean before it sprouts. So you get two books at once. The little one reads the big poetic line, the older one reads all the labeled detail, and everybody's looking at the same gorgeous page of seeds and sprouts and flowers. It's the first in a whole set that does the same trick for eggs, butterflies, rocks, and nests.
This is nonfiction that doesn't feel like nonfiction, which is exactly what a nature-study shelf needs for its younger and middle children. The layered text means one book stretches across ages: a five-year-old rides the poetry, a nine-year-old mines the facts. And it turns an ordinary seed, the most overlookable thing in the yard, into something worth kneeling down to look at, which is the whole habit you're trying to build.