From far away, a flower garden may look still, unpopulated. But get a lot closer and there will be bugs.
Illustrator Gwen Millward opens Stories from Bug Garden with a lush, beautiful garden so detailed in ink, pencil and watercolor it's almost pointillist, inviting readers in with an open gate, a path, a creek. In the first poem, "The Garden": "No one came down the weedy path/ to take care of it/ or sit among the flowers./ So they moved in/ one/ by one/ by one." The "they" author Lisa Moser (Railroad Hank) is referring to are bugs. The garden's comical, sweet-faced, bug-eyed residents are introduced in storylike poems, or poem-like stories, full of teasing humor and wordplay. In "Ladybug," Ladybug is no lady--she runs barefoot and makes mud angels. Butterfly doesn't see the mighty horse hooves Horsefly is pretending to have, but Horsefly gets even: "Well, you're not Butter, either," he sniffs. In "Dragonfly," Dragonfly tries to warn Horsefly "Go no farther," but Horsefly ignores him... and flies right in to "a gob of tree sap." Bee just wants to be, despite all the bugs bugging him to make honey or sip nectar. Big Ant and Little Ant snuggle up to watch the botanical equivalent of a fireworks display: flowers blooming.
In the spirit of The Wind in the Willows, this whimsical collection of sometimes fable-like storylets offers a cozy microcosm of creatures. Readers will be glad to see the wheelbarrow and gate they glimpsed from a distance among the garden's close-up wonders... a home for the bugs now, no longer abandoned. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness