If you are a kid — or if you were one in a former life — you should be curious about the living things around you. Have you noticed the overnight appearance of colorful flowers on a tree you mistook for dead wood? Are you alarmed by tiny armies of miniature alligators, crawling all over your rosebush? Is your pink, weeping cherry tree suddenly blossoming in white on skyward branches? Would you like to plant a garden, but have no yard and no idea how to begin?

You can learn to appreciate plants and their environment — your environment— at any age. Let me introduce a book that will welcome you into a fun way of meeting the world of everything growing. Find out why plants have such unusual names, why not everything grows together, how jumping in feet first with the loppers can harm your tree’s health. Help the planet while helping plants, and share your growing garden with the furred, feathered, scaled, segmented and antennaed.