Plano Reads: Gardening

Are you ready for spring? Get ready for planting, sprouts, flowers and more with this book list. After all, as Cicero said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

Whether you’re looking to share your love of flowers with a little one or test out your green thumb, this book list has something for everyone to enjoy. We’ve included titles for all ages, from preschool to adult. You can see the books below and place them on hold in our catalog.

Board Books

Note: Board books are unavailable for holds requests. To check out these titles, you’ll need to come to a library and grab it from the display. The catalog link will show you where the book is available.

Allie’s Garden by Sabra Chebby Request
When a little girl goes to her garden to harvest vegetables, she comes into contact with animals made from vegetables, including a carrot fox and a zucchini snake.

Counting in the Garden by Emily Hruby Request
Counts new items in groups numbering one through twelve as they are added to a garden.

In the Garden by Elizabeth Spurr Request
Pictures and brief rhymes depict a young boy digging in the dirt and planting seeds that, over time, grow into shoots, leaves, blossoms, and fruit.

Picture Books

Badger’s Perfect Garden by Marsha Diane Arnold Request
It’s springtime and Badger is ready to plant the perfect garden. He has spent months gathering and sorting seeds. It’s been a lot of work but it’s worth it. His friends Red Squirrel, Dormouse, and Weasel come to help. They weed. They rake. And finally they plant. Afterward, everyone celebrates, and Badger can already imagine the perfect rows of flowers and vegetables. But then a rainstorm comes and washes away the beautiful seeds. Badger’s perfect garden is ruined. Or is it?

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss Request
When a little boy plants a carrot seed, everyone tells him it won’t grow. But when you are very young there are some things you just know, so he waters the seed and pulls the weeds and he waits.

The Curious Garden by Peter Brown Request
Liam discovers a hidden garden and with careful tending spreads color throughout the gray city.

Flower Garden by Eve Bunting Request
Helped by her father, a young girl prepares a flower garden as a birthday surprise for her mother.

Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert Request
A father and child grow vegetables and then make them into a soup.

In a Garden by Tim McCanna Request
In a garden a seed grows to sprout to bud to flower, thriving in harmony with living creatures, especially insects.

Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn Request
Lola plants a flower garden with her parent’s help, and watches it grow.

My Garden by Kevin Henkes Request
After helping her mother weed, water, and chase the rabbits from their garden, a young girl imagines her dream garden complete with jellybean bushes, chocolate rabbits, and tomatoes the size of beach balls.

Plant the Tiny Seed by Christie Matheson Request
Plant a seed to watch it grow. Press on the cloud to make it rain. Jiggle the book to scatter the seeds. Interactive text teaches very young children how flowers sprout and mature. Contains watercolor depictions of a flower in various stages of growth

Planting a Rainbow by Losi Ehlert Request
A mother and child plant a rainbow of flowers in the family garden.

Junior Fiction

Kitty and the Sky Garden Adventure by Paula Harrison Request
Kitty and her feline friends discover a secret roof garden and learn all about plants and gardening.

The Night Garden by Polly Horvath Request
It is World War II, and Franny and her parents, Sina and Old Tom, enjoy a quiet life on a farm on Vancouver Island. Franny writes, Sina sculpts, and Old Tom tends to their many gardens–including the ancient, mysterious night garden. Their peaceful life is interrupted when their neighbor begs Sina to watch her children. Soon after the children move in, amid the chaos of the household, Sina sees UFOs, a hermit makes himself useful, a mystery involving the neighbor’s husband and a spy plane emerges, and the night garden reveals its powers of wish fulfillment.

The Year of the Garden by Andrea Cheng Request
Follows perceptive, astute Anna as she strives to grow a perfect garden — only to realize that the garden she grows with her new friend is more than good enough, weeds and all.

Junior Nonfiction

Dig In!: 12 Easy Gardening Projects Using Kitchen Scraps by Kari Cornell Request
Grow your own fruits and vegetables from nothing but kitchen scraps! Instead of throwing away leftovers in your kitchen, learn how to use them to grow more. Step-by-step instructions and recipes will help you enjoy the fruits of your labor.

From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons Request
Explores the intricate relationship between seeds and the plants which they produce.

Gardening with Emma: Grow and Have Fun: A Kid-to-Kid Guide by Emma Biggs Request
Thirteen-year-old Emma Biggs is passionate about gardening and eager to share her passion with other kids! Gardening with Emma is a kid-to-kid guide to growing healthy food and raising the coolest, most awesome plants while making sure there’s plenty of fun. With plants that tickle and make noise, tips for how to grow a flower stand garden, and suggestions for veggies from tiny to colossal, Emma offers a range of original, practical, and entertaining advice and inspiration. She provides lots of useful know-how about soil, sowing, and caring for a garden throughout the seasons, along with ways to make play spaces among the plants. Lively photography and Emma’s own writing (with some help from her gardening dad, Steve) capture the authentic creativity of a kid who loves to be outdoors, digging in the dirt.

Gardening Lab for Kids: Starting a Garden: Fun Experiments to Learn, Grow, Harvest, Make, and Play by Renata Fossen Brown Request
Offers thirteen plant-related activities designed to teach children about botany, ecology, the seasons, and patience.

A Kid’s Guide to Container Gardening by Stephanie Bearce Request
Introduces children to container gardening and offers advice on how to find the best containers, grow different types of plants, stop pests, and more.

Adult

Download this PDF of new gardening books, Texas-specific, and a list of eLibrary resources from Kanopy videos to databases:

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Garden Design Master Class: 100 Lessons from the World’s Finest Designers on the Art of the Garden edited by Carl Dellatore Request
A classic in the making, Garden Design Master Class brings together 100 essays by some of the top garden designers working today, from acknowledged experts such as Nancy Goslee Power on sunlight and Arabella Lennox-Boyd on borders, to acclaimed tastemakers such as Carolyne Roehm on the pleasures of a vegetable garden. Spanning styles and genres, principles and tenets, collectively these essays and their accompanying images represent a comprehensive education for the reader, giving him or her the benefit of expert design advice and philosophy, from practical considerations such as seedlings and pathways to stylistic concerns such as asymmetry and rhythm. Each essay is paired with photographs of the designer’s work that illustrate the principles being discussed, adding a powerful visual component to the book.

Get Growing: A Family Guide to Gardening Inside and Out by Holly Farrell Request
For parents and children who enjoy engaging with the outdoors and want to do more activities together, this beautifully designed book explains how plants work, describes the building blocks of gardening, and shows how to grow everything from cacti to cucumbers. With great facts and practical projects, giving the reader a lot of information it’s an ideal introduction for complete beginners, designed to inspire a life-long love of gardening.

Grow Food at Home: Simple Methods for Small Spaces: Veggies, Fruits, and Herbs to Grow in the Kitchen, on the Patio, or in the Garden by John Tullock Request
Everything you need to know to grow good food without a yard Grow food for freshness. Grow food organically. Grow food to connect with nature. Whatever the goal, you don’t need a lot of space to enjoy the benefits of homegrown veggies, herbs, and fruits. In Grow Food at Home, gardening expert John Tullock shows readers just how easy it is to enjoy “farm”-fresh produce grown right on the windowsill, the porch, or in a tiny backyard. Covering artificial lighting, hydroponics, vertical gardening, straw-bale planters, and more, the book offers even the most confined apartment dwellers plenty of options to get growing. Tullock shares all the tips and tricks readers need to make small-space gardening a success, with information on starting seeds, transplanting, succession planting, “crop” rotation, and other procedures-all tailored to the small-space garden-plus recipes to make the most of the harvest. Readers will be energized to grow a mouth-watering selection of micro-crops, from lettuces and herbs to tomatoes, cucumbers, beets, and even small fruits-no matter how little room they have available.

Grow Great Vegetables in Texas by Trisha Shirey Request
With month-by-month regional vegetable gardening information, 50 detailed plant profiles, and color photographs throughout, this is the essential guide for vegetable gardeners in Texas.

Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden by Niki Jabbour Request
Niki Jabbour shows how to use row covers, shade cloth, low tunnels, cold frames, hoophouses, and other protective structures to create controlled growing spaces for vegetables to thrive.

The New Gardener’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Beautiful & Bountiful Garden by Daryl Beyers Request
From one of the experts at the New York Botanical Garden, this guide shares the science of good gardening in a design-forward, beginner-friendly way that will appeal to new gardeners everywhere.

The Story of Gardening by Penelope Hobhouse Request
Penelope Hobhouse, the legendary authority on garden history, composes a beautifully crafted, lavishly illustrated history of gardening over millennia. From the cooling fountains of the Alhambra to the clean lines of the French parterre, The Story of Gardening draws fascinating connections among gardens across time and place. Hobhouse addresses styles and techniques from all over the world, revealing the origins of the world’s most magnificent gardens. Award-winning journalist and garden historian Ambra Edwards worked alongside Hobhouse to bring this comprehensive classic up-to-date with today’s most recent garden developments and trends.

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Be sure sure to browse the library catalog online here, and use your library card number and PIN (last four digits of your phone number) to place a hold request.

Want to learn more about gardening? Join our upcoming virtual programs:

Spring Into Gardening, February 9 at 1 p.m. on Zoom
Winter’s over and it’s time to do a spring spruce-up in the yard. Join us for our top tips on getting your landscape ready for the new season.

Made in the Shade: Plants for North Texas, February 23 at 1 p.m. on Zoom
Is your shady landscape an oasis of cool – or a project that makes you lose your cool? Learn the secrets of creating a restful (and successful) retreat in the shelter of shade.