By Barbara Plantholt Melera

For more than 20 years, my business partner, Victor DiPace, and I have had many, many requests to write a book on gardening, its history as it relates to the United States and how Mother Nature (AKA The Lord) has created an amazingly dynamic and pervasive system. This system is forever responding to the changes in plants, animals and their habitats with which this planet challenges them.

With our combined knowledge and decades of experience, one would think that this project would be an easy one. However, there were so many topics that needed to be tackled, and so many issues that needed to be addressed, that, quite simply, we had no idea where to begin.

By far, the most important, complicated and seemingly insurmountable issue was how to teach children about gardening when their parents have never gardened. To write a book about gardening, we needed to start with seeds. Then we needed to discuss how seeds become plants and finally, we needed to describe how the seeds from the plants we had cultivated traveled to other gardens and started more plants. We needed to teach, inform and inspire the child’s loved ones, as well as the child.

For anyone who has lived the life of a gardener, they understand that gardening is about relationships. Not only the relationships frequently described such as, thirsty plants require water, hungry plants require fertilizing and sunlight but many others. Most gardeners we know have enjoyed a lifelong gardening relationship with family members, neighbors or both. These neighbors and family members spent the time with that child to teach them the fundamentals of gardening. These adults alone, invested their time, and from that time spent, a relationship of love, trust and respect grew.

One of the priorities Victor and I had for this book, was that, to a large extent, this book needed to be based on true events. It would be easier for children and most adults to relate to the content. (Once again, relationships are what gardening is all about.) There really was a Bird Poop Garden, seeded with poppies, lupine and sunflowers derived from black crows that pooped in our vegetable garden. It developed exactly the way it is described in the book. The characters are fictionalized combinations of children and loved ones Victor and I have known.

You will notice immediately, as you flip through the pages of this book, that the illustrations are unlike most that you see today. They are more vivid, more artistic and more sophisticated than the illustrations generated today for children’s books. We wanted to return to the elaborate artistic style of 50+ years ago with shading and detailed facial expressions and the exquisite colors that Nature produces. Computers are able to do many things, but they cannot duplicate the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.

Our illustrator, Ginger Triplett, is a gardener and she understands. Her illustrations captured colors, shapes and details so accurately. Two gardeners inspired this book. One gardener wrote this book, and one gardener captured the natural detail illustrated in this book.

One of the most amazing things about this book is that on the back page there is a pocket containing a seed packet with real poppy seeds from the real Bird Poop Garden. We have been collecting these seeds from poppy seed pods for 7 years.

We hope that these seeds find a home in the soil surrounding some young child’s yard, and that a relationship grows between that child, an adult that he/she loves and the earth with its pollinating crows.