Giraffe the Gardener by Kimberley Adams

Giraffe the Gardener is the latest in award-winning author and illustrator Kimberley Adams’ series of delightful children’s picture books featuring anthropomorphic animals.

Kimberley herself is a keen gardener and nature lover who lives with her husband and two young daughters in a shipping-container house they built in Day’s Bay.

On the cover, Father Giraffe takes centre stage. He is wheeling his daughter in a wheelbarrow and is about to go to work in his beautifully designed garden. In the foreground, a profusion of pretty flowers is in full bloom. Further back are greenhouses with an abundant supply of fruit and vegetables. Tall leafy trees form an elegant archway above. His friends, puffin and turtle, are there too.

Father Giraffe is teaching his daughter to be a gardener. He would love her to give him a hand with digging, planting, and sowing seeds. But first he wants to tell her how he learnt to create his special garden by helping out in the gardens of his animal friends. Everywhere he went, I rolled up my sleeves and mucked right in, he tells her.

On the following pages, the pictures show Father Giraffe working in his friends’ gardens. He learnt how to artfully prune and shape trees in Turtle’s formal Zen Garden and helped the cow to harvest elderflowers in her pretty cottage garden. He volunteered in the Elephant’s greenhouse and learnt the skill of plucking mushrooms from logs in the orangutan’s rainforest. He is also shown helping other friends in their greenhouses and vegetable patches.

But when he gets busy in his own garden, poor Daddy Giraffe strains his neck when he awkwardly reaches out to trim a bough high up in a tree. Luckily, it is not broken, but on doctor’s orders, he is forced to take a rest. He is so worried about his garden, knowing that he will be unable to work for weeks to keep on top of the tasks, so the garden will grow and get messy, and the weeds will run amok.

But Giraffe Junior comes to the rescue. Her Dad has taught her well, and she gives a callout to all their friends to give a hand. Teamwork gets the jobs done and they finish with a convivial picnic by a pond in the garden, sharing the food each gardener has grown.

Children love books about animals, and Kimberley’s rhyming story, which flows nicely with some repetitive refrains, is a pleasure to read aloud. But while her story is engaging, it is the gorgeous, detailed illustrations, each on a double-page spread, of all the various kinds of gardens which make this book so special. And children will also enjoy hunting for the 18 garden gnomes hidden throughout the book.

Just a small criticism: the tiny notes added to the bottom of some pages to explain what the names of gardens mean, how they have been planted, or the equipment that is being used are in very small print and are hard to read. It would have been better to add a glossary at the end of the book.

Kimberley has written Giraffe the Gardener to make children enthusiastic about the joys of gardening and her enchanting illustrations of many kinds of gardens, and of Father Giraffe and his friends happily mucking in together, are bound to help with that.

And she would love them to adopt her philosophy of the importance of living more sustainably by growing your own food, and sharing your surplus produce with each other, for as Giraffe likes to say: 'Sharing is part of the gardener’s way.'

Reviewer: Lyn Potter

Puffin