Let me to tell you a story…

In 1971, my first garden mentor was Angelo Pellegrini, a beloved professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the father of a close friend, and hosted me during the time it took to sell my car before my first trip abroad to experience France and the UK. He’d recently published the book “The Food Lover’s Garden” and I sat curled up in his living room reading it from cover to cover, while he’d prepare meals from the ingredients we’d just picked. I was hooked.

I’d been enthralled by the plant kingdom since I was a little girl, trying to grow any vegetable scrap coming out of our kitchen. So now, I truly hope more and more children will see what I saw: MAGIC.

But it wasn’t until I experienced Angelo’s Garden as a young adult that I really understood their truly magical powers. He would crush fragrant herbs beneath my nose, teach me how to pick leaves of kale without damaging the living plant that could grow to be almost as big as a small tree, harvest his famous beans, snack on fresh figs and make compost in a city lot.

While my own father had been the cook in the San Francisco apartment where I grew up, we mostly ate frozen vegetables, canned soups and TV dinners. So this was my first experience of eating FRESH food, seeing how it grew and eating it freshly picked within hours.

When I had a child, I brought her to meet Angelo as a three year old to experience his garden. That day was well recorded in photos, that inspired a mockup for a children’s book. But as a single mom I needed to focus on more pressing matters…

So the book dummy lived in a storage locker until a few weeks ago when my daughter helped me unearth old portfolios of my botanical art. She’s now an award winning video story producer herself, so her opinion meant even more than purely family sentiment. As we looked through the old book dummy together, her eye for visual storytelling encouraged me to bring this story forward now.

Here we go…

Many things have changed in the publishing world over the years. There are now a multitude of ways the material can be presented to actually be educational as well as fun. So now I can see this as a teaching tool, for children to learn how they can do their own growing experiments like I once did, even if they don’t yet have a garden. Better yet if they do. And, I’m excited by it all!

So if you’d like to support the process of my updating the original content to be more compelling for children of this time, please make a donation by clicking on the images above or below that will take you to the donation page for RainforestECO.