The wind's garden

[Picture source : Amazon.com]

The Wind's Garden
By Bethany Roberts
llustrated by Melanie Hope Greenberg

Ages : 3-6 years

The book opens up to the sight of a little girl pushing her wheelbarrow across her backyard, loaded with all the things she would need to begin a small garden. She digs the dirt, rakes it smooth and plants the seeds. And alongside her little garden, another bigger garden is in the making too. The wind's garden.

The wind blows and swirls around throwing seeds all over the ground. The girl waters her seeds carefully with her little watering can and they are just beginning to sprout. The wind's garden also gets tended to by Mother Nature, when the rains come and nurture the dry parched ground. After a period of time, both the gardens have grown and flourished a bit. The girl pulls weeds out of her little garden and tends to the plants. The wind's garden has as many weeds growing alongside all the wild flowers and plants. The sun shines down on the rich dark ground in her garden and the wind's garden too. Bees and butterflies fly around, buzzing busily and both the gardens grow and grow and grow...

The little girl's garden is a picture of neat perfection, carefully spaced out and manicured; and the winds garden's is a riot of colours and lush, wild and overabundant greenery. What is so entrancing about this book is the comparison of how nature tends to her vast garden, in much the same way as the little girl tends to her little patch in the backyard. It is lovely to think of all the trees, flowers and shrubs we see growing outside our homes as belonging to the landscape of nature's designs, and the way everything flows in such a harmonious cycle...how the wind does its work in lifting flowers and seeds and scattering them to the many corners of the earth, where they eventually take root and grow; how the timely rainclouds gather and give the much needed sustenance to these living things; how the sun shines down brightly, drying up the rain drops and giving nurture of a different kind. And how in response to these ministrations of care, the colours burst forth and come to life and make the world around us just a little more pleasing to the eye.

I had a wonderful time explaining all these little scientific yet simple things to Winkie, who took a look out the window, spotted all the trees and plants that dotted our backyard and correlated them to the wind's garden. That, it itself, should spell the success of the book!