Step into a garden. What might you find? Some gardens are carefully cultivated, with hedges that guide a visitor’s path and curated plant specimens. But a weedy garden provides a different view.
In The Weedy Garden: A Happy Habitat for Wild Friends, author Margaret Renkl uses melodious phrasing to pull children and their caregivers into the world outside. She guides readers through the garden, introducing not only the plants that comprise it but also the creatures that call the garden home. The book’s back matter elaborates on plants that attract wildlife and how to grow them.
Though it includes instructive material, The Weedy Garden is first an adventure into the land and imagination. Each new animal introduction engages the reader’s imagination, bringing them into the garden’s life. Thoughtfully chosen phrases slip and slide off the tongue—“flower-farmer,” “slender green snake,” “stippled soil”—and make the narration perfectly fun for a read-aloud. Renkl intentionally builds sentences with words that young readers will delight in learning: “The whole listening singing buzzing whirring dancing weedy world is filled with friends.”
Illustrations by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, capture the world from a child’s vantage point. The perspective of the art changes depending on where in the garden the narration directs our gaze: Before revealing a clutch of bunnies tucked into leaves and flowers, Billy draws us close to blades of grass. The reader looks downward upon creatures like a turtle but spots a chipmunk at eye level as it scurries along a stone wall.
Through lilting text and vividly colored collage illustrations that welcome study, Margaret and Billy Renkl invite close attention to the land, just as in their earlier work for adults (Late Migrations, The Comfort of Crows). But this time, readers gain an intimacy with nature that is easy to miss when standing at adult height.