Eleven-year-old Gertie, lover of plants and animals, finds a working wishbone in the park and turns her family's home into a magical House of Nature.

Ruth Stout's classic How to Have a Green Thumb is a welcoming and trusted advisor for any gardener seeking a natural, bountiful harvest.

Where Tristou touches, flowers grow. He makes flowers grow in slums, prisons, and hospitals. His masterpiece: he causes the guns to shoot flowers and a senseless war is ended. It is then that the people discover he was an angel.

Winner of two National Science Fairs for his work on plant life, thirteen-year-old Grady Jacobs isn't exactly Mr. Popularity. But he doesn't care. He's spending the summer with the famous botanist Dr. Phillip Carter in the Amazon jungle trying to save the rain forest with a new species of super trees. Although his duties are mostly relegated to kitchen patrol, Grady stumbles on a startling discovery: a binary system of sounds that enables him to control the movement of trees. Even as Grady discovers the tree language, he realizes that Carter's super trees aren't replenishing the Amazon's ecosystem -- they're killing it. When his unauthorized experiments are discovered, Grady flees from Carter's camp and finds refuge with the Urah-wau Indian tribe. but even with the tribe's help and the secret tree language, can Grady stop Carter's super trees? With his keen eye for popular culture now trained on the environment, award-winning author Rob Thomas tells a coming-of-age story bursting with action and adventure. Hanh on to that vine: It's going to be a wild ride.

In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Whether a gift was meant to keep a daughter warm, put a roof over her head, instruct her in the ways of womanhood, encourage her talents, or just remind her of a mother’s love, each story gets to the heart of a relationship. Rita Dove remembers the box of nail polish that inspired her to paint her nails in the wild stripes and polka dots she wears to this day. Lisa See writes about the gift of writing from her mother, Carolyn See. Cecilia Muñoz remembers both the wok her mother gave her and a lifetime of home-cooked family meals. Judith Hillman Paterson revisits the year of sobriety her mother bequeathed to her when Paterson was nine, the year before her mother died of alcoholism. Abigail Pogrebin writes about her middle-aged bat mitzvah, for which her mother provided flowers after a lifetime of guilt for skipping her daughter’s religious education. Margo Jefferson writes about her mother’s gold dress from the posh department store where they could finally shop as black women. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, ?no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, “whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most."

"In this profoundly moving memoir, Owita teaches Wall how to find grace amid heartbreak and to accept that beauty exists because it is fleeting—as in her garden, as in life." —People, 4 stars "A perfect spring awakening." —Good Housekeeping A true story of a unique friendship between two people who had nothing—and ultimately everything—in common. Carol Wall, a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, was at a crossroads in her life. Her children were grown; she had successfully overcome illness; her beloved parents were getting older. One day she notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor’s yard. His name is Giles Owita. He bags groceries at the supermarket. He comes from Kenya. And he’s very good at gardening. Before long Giles is transforming not only Carol’s yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different, a caring bond grows between them. But they both hold long-buried secrets that, when revealed, will cement their friendship forever.