Saturday 25 October 2008

Planting a Rainbow...



Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

Here is the review from Amazon.com:
From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 1 Planting a Rainbow , a companion to Ehlert's Growing Vegetable Soup (HBJ, 1987), is a dazzling celebration of the colorful variety in a flower garden and the cyclical excitement of gardening. A young child relates in ten simple sentences the yearly cycle and process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden. Mother and child plant bulbs in fall, order seeds from catalogs in winter, eagerly anticipate the first shoots of spring, select seedlings in summer, ``and watch the rainbow grow,'' reveling in the opulence of color. The power of this book lies in the glowing brilliance and bold abstraction of the double-page collages. Ehlert combines simple, stylized shapes of flat, high intensity color into abstract yet readily identifiable images of plants and flowers while clearly and colorfully labeling each plant on an adjacent garden marker. Children will especially delight in the six pages of varying width depicting all the flowers of each color of the rainbow. A celebration of the garden, the power of shape and color, and the harmony of text and image in a picture book. Pamela Miller Ness, The Fenn School, Concord, Mass.

This is a really beautiful book, that we read in late summer. Today, we began our own rainbow garden.
Here are the bulbs we planted:
Red: Greigu Tulips
Orange: Tulip Orange Emperor
Yellow: Narcissi Red Devon
Green: Double snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis flore Pleno
Blue: Striped Squills, Puschkinia Libanotica
Indigo/Violet: English Bluebells

& here is my rather wet helper..

2 comments:

joc4jesus said...

Great idea Lynn. We don't have very much room in our garden but I may do a similar thing with bulbs across the kitchen windowsill. I feel a freecycle wanted coming on. lol.
Jo

Lynn said...

great idea, Jo!