With a text that celebrates their perseverance, endnotes that describe their uses and illustrations that commemorate their beauty, this book invites young readers to re-examine their view of weeds.
"Weeds send their seeds into the world in wondrous ways: fluffing up like feathers and floating away on the wind," reads the text as a girl blows on a dandelion and sends its seeds soaring. The red sky and pine-green meadow in the mixed-media and collage illustrations make an ideal contrast for the white umbrella-like seed pods. Next, the girl's red sneakers appear in close-up alongside her dog's paws, moving through long grasses where dandelion seeds catch on "prickly burrs that stick to socks and fur." Elegant language and incidental rhymes make these pages as fun to read aloud as they are to pore over. Author and artist tour the seasons. "Weed seeds find a way to wait, sitting still in icy earth all winter," and others bake on the "white-hot sidewalk" in the summer heat. Fisher invents a visual story line that follows girl and dog through the pages, and tucks in magenta nodding thistle and orange hawkweed aplenty. The final spread erupts in fuchsia-colored fireweed, from which the girl twines a necklace.
Endnotes describe many of the weeds' medicinal and edible uses and make an incisive point: "any plant could be considered a weed if it is growing in a place where someone does not want it to be." This fact-filled picture book that reads like poetry may well cause young readers to rethink the idea of unwanted guests in the garden. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness