By Peter Brown
A boy in a gray, treeless city finds one struggling little garden on an old railway line, starts tending it, and slowly turns the whole city green.
Liam lives in a city with no green in it at all, just gray buildings and gray sidewalks and smoke. One rainy day, exploring, he climbs up to an abandoned elevated railway and finds a few sad, half-dead wildflowers hanging on between the tracks. He decides to look after them. He's a clumsy gardener at first, but he keeps at it, and the plants perk up and start to spread. Season after season the garden creeps along the old rails, over walls and rooftops, and other people start noticing and start their own. By the end the whole gray city has burst into leaves and color, and Liam is one of many gardeners.
It's a quiet, hopeful book with a big visible payoff, which is exactly right for a child who likes to make things grow or who's just planted their first seed. There's no villain and no scare, just a boy being patient and the reward getting bigger every season. And because the garden spreads to other people too, your child comes away with the feeling that small good things catch on, without anyone ever spelling out a lesson.