For example, as the bees travel, readers learn that “onion flowers are round and fluffy” and “fennel is a plant that is used in cooking.” Other facts are oversimplified and as a result are not accurate.

There are some interesting facts throughout the book, but many pieces of trivia are too, well trivial, to prove useful. The information is scattered-much like the scout bees-and as a result, both the nominal plot and informational content are tissue-thin. As the scout bees traverse the fields, readers are provided with a potpourri of facts and statements about bees. Perhaps the trouble is that Ehlert has captured all the color of the garden, but not its subtle gradations or the light, the space, the air, and the continual movement and change.įollow a swarm of bees as they leave a beekeeper’s apiary in search of a new home. There is also little sense of the relative times for growing and blooming-everything seems to come almost at once. The stylized forms are almost more abstractions than representations (and why is the daisy yellow?). Bold, stylish, and indubitably inspired by real flowers, there is still (as with its predecessor) a link missing between these illustrations with their large, solid areas of color and the real experience of a garden. Unlike the vegetables, whose juxtaposed colors were almost painfully bright, the flowers make a splendidly gaudy array, first taken together and then interestingly grouped by color-the pages vary in size here so that colored strips down the right-hand side combine to make a broad rainbow.

'Mom and I' plant bulbs (even rhizomes), choose seeds, buy seedlings, and altogether grow about 20 species. From the artist who created last year's shoutingly vivid Growing Vegetable Soup, a companion volume about raising a flower garden.

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert