A Gardener's Alphabet (ISBN 0618033807)

Illustrations match a Garden's Beauty:
Mary Azarian was inspired by her own garden and has used the perfect form of illustration - woodcuts - to bring to life the alphabet of a garden. The perspecives range from above and below the ground and show not only the joys but also hardships that come from creating a garden. The simple words and strong visuals will be great for children learning about the natural world, but is also a beautiful gift for the gardener or nature lover in your life.

lovely, but...:
I got a chance to see Mary Azarian's new alphabet book yesterday. I think her illustrations are heartwarming and lovely, and have enjoyed them for years in the Cook's Garden catalog and in books like The Plain Reader. I'm also a gardener and a former children's librarian ,and I enjoy seeing gardening depicted in children's books. However, I must say I was sadly disapponted to see no people of color depicted in any of the illustrations in this book. Surely Ms. Azarian must have met a nonwhite gardener at some point in her life; if not, that's sad, and she is welcome to come to my house and meet me before the next book. As a person of color I felt saddened and left out as I looked through the pages; how would a small child (of any ethnicity) feel? Had it not been for this exclusion I would have joyfully given this book five stars.

Lovely book, but...:
This is a lovely book. The illustrations are beautifully done, the vocabulary is carefully chosen - and the illustrations make very clear the meaning of unusual words like "xeriscape", but there's not much you can do for x anyway. But, it's true. Every person in this book is white, and it really is a little weird. I don't live anywhere where I can consistently expect the people I meet to be white, so it would never occur to me to draw a whole book full of people of just that one race. I wonder where the author lives that it wouldn't occur to her to draw a more normal sample of the population. It's not a bad book, it's just - that sort of thing is very obvious, and kinda annoying.