Discusses the loss of fruit and vegetable varieties and the genetically modified industrial monocultures being used today, shares the author's personal experiences growing, saving, and swapping seeds, and deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds.

To author Stephie Morton, nature's powerful forces are a metaphor for the hardships faced by displaced children. Kids, like seeds, thrive when given a chance. Each of the three seeds in this story—a cherry seed in the Middle East, an acacia seed in Australia, and a lotus seed in Asia—survives a difficult journey through flood, fire, or drought, then sprouts (in the case of the lotus seed, a hundred years later) and flourishes. Stephie's verses and Nicole Wong's art make a picture book to treasure.

A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhóta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited. On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.

“This fun and inspiring season-by-season description of a school gardening project could encourage others to repeat this extraordinary experience.” — School Library Journal Want to grow what you eat and eat what you grow? Visit this lively, flourishing school-and-community garden and be inspired to cultivate your own. Part celebration, part simple how-to, this close-up look at a vibrant garden and its enthusiastic gardeners is blooming with photos that will have readers ready to roll up their sleeves and dig in.

Art and science collaborate on a fascinating story with extraordinary images in a highly-acclaimed book. Seeds, the most complex organs produced by plants, ensure the biodiversity of our planet. They vary from the impressive Seychelles nut that weighs twenty kilos to the dust-like seeds of the orchids. Some wait for hundreds of years to find the right place and time for germination after travelling thousands of kilometres or just a few centimetres. The evolution of their highly sophisticated structures from prehistoric times to today makes fascinating reading as do the wiles plants use to attract and deceive their chosen pollinators. The extraordinary images that accompany this story provide an unprecedented presentation of the magnificent diversity of seeds in all their exquisite beauty and sophistication. Fruits are the keepers of the precious seeds that ensure our future; some are edible, others inedible and many, quite simply, incredible.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.