By Lois Ehlert
A mother and child plant bulbs, seeds, and seedlings and grow a whole rainbow of flowers, sorted color by color in big, bright cut-paper art.
A parent and child plant a flower garden together, and the book walks through the whole year of it: tucking bulbs in the ground in fall, waiting through winter, ordering seeds, planting seedlings, and then the flowers come up in a blaze of color. The back half turns into a rainbow, a spread for red flowers, then orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, each one labeled, each one a different bloom your child can point at and name. It ends with the whole garden picked into an armful of color to carry inside.
It gives a very young child two things at once: a satisfying sort-by-color game and a real, gentle picture of how a garden actually happens, from bulb in the dirt to bloom in your arms. There's no story tension to manage, so it's a pure and happy first garden book, and the labeled flowers build vocabulary while your child thinks they're just picking out colors.