All That Grows

Wearing a serious expression, the narrator of this story about cultivation and categorization learns about plants from their older sister, who seems to retain all manner of related knowledge: “How does my sister know?” Told that magnolias smell like lemon cake, and quince trees only produce sweet fruit in warmer climes, the narrator helps their sister weed the plot in which she’s growing vegetables (“It’s hard work not to mistake one for the other”). Warm, dappled pastel art by Wong (When You Can Swim) captures sunlight playing over the East Asian–cued siblings as they tend the seedlings. Wondering why “only some plants are called vegetables,” the narrator keeps watering a thickly weeded patch that their sister has given up on; notes the value of wild-propagated daffodils, dandelions, and maples; and enjoys cooked fiddlehead ferns, which will “make you sick for days if you have them raw.” One day, white flowers that the sister has never before seen appear in the weedy patch, an occasion that vindicates the idea that the narrator, too, is a gardener. Played out through quiet internality, the narrator’s questioning curiosity, and the discovery they make while trusting their own intuition, provides quiet satisfaction. Ages 3–6. Agent: Wendi Gu, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Mar.)