Here are 100 books that Biscuit in the Garden fans have personally recommended if you like
Biscuit in the Garden.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I love animals, and I always have. I was an only child, but in a house full of animals with two dogs, two cats, fish, birds, and horses. My first words were “doggie” and “kitty” respectively. I work as a filmmaker now, and it seems like sacrilege to say that I only have one cat (and no dogs), but I still ride horses, and hope to expand my personal menagerie in years to come. I am thrilled to recommend my favorite dog books spanning various stages of my life, since these have always been favorites.
My dad used to read to me every night as a kid, and among my favorites were those of the whimsical Dr. Seuss-esque variety.
While this book isn’t technically penned by Dr. Seuss, it maintains the same whimsy through its illustrations. The simplicity of the text helped me learn to identify words as a small kid. Upon revisiting the book as an adult, I am also delighted by the blunt honesty of the illustrated dogs.
My dad passed away recently, and the memory of him reading this book to me has become even more cherished.
Whether by foot, boat, car, or unicycle, P. D. Eastman's lovable dogs demonstrate the many ways one can travel in this condensed, board-book version perfect for babies and toddlers.
I belong to a family of dog lovers – Oscar, the black cocker spaniel; Buddy, the brown-and-white beagle; Riley, the buff cocker spaniel; Buffy, a black boxer mix, Milo and Max, Golden retrievers. In fact, cavorting with Riley at a San Francisco park was my inspiration for Bark Park. I also love children, especially my grandchildren Connor and Kasey. When Kasey, at five years of age, read my book Bark Park aloud for the first time, my heart swelled with joy! It took me back to my own young daughter Laura whose first all-by-herself read-aloud had been: Go, dog, go! So it’s only natural for me to combine my two great loves – dogs and children – with these book recommendations.
How Rocket Learned to Read is a charming easy-to-read picture book based on the joys of teaching and learning. In it, a little yellow bird teaches Rocket, the spotted dog, to read. Rocket begins by learning the alphabet. After that, he picks up little words like “Grrrrrr!” and “Whoosh!.” Little bird helps Rocket move on to words like “fall” and “red,” signaling a change in seasons. When winter comes, the little yellow bird must fly south. Although Rocket misses little bird, he keeps up with his schoolwork by practicing writing his “ABCs” in the snow. When the little bird returns in the spring, Rocket is now splashing in a word he can now spell: “mud.” Best of all he can spell the word “wag,” which is what he does with his tail when the little bird happily returns for the next season of school.
Rocket is an irresistible puppy who is not the least bit interested in reading - he'd much prefer to be chasing leaves, chewing sticks or listening to the birds sing. But one day, while trying to take a nap, Rocket unexpectedly finds himself in the classroom of a very determined little bird who captures his imagination with her lively stories. Together, they learn to read, one glorious letter at a time!
I belong to a family of dog lovers – Oscar, the black cocker spaniel; Buddy, the brown-and-white beagle; Riley, the buff cocker spaniel; Buffy, a black boxer mix, Milo and Max, Golden retrievers. In fact, cavorting with Riley at a San Francisco park was my inspiration for Bark Park. I also love children, especially my grandchildren Connor and Kasey. When Kasey, at five years of age, read my book Bark Park aloud for the first time, my heart swelled with joy! It took me back to my own young daughter Laura whose first all-by-herself read-aloud had been: Go, dog, go! So it’s only natural for me to combine my two great loves – dogs and children – with these book recommendations.
In Dig, Dogs, Dig early readers will delight in the rhymes and illustrations that are context clues to the words in the text. As the hard-working crew of dogs builds a new park, they dig with bulldozers and dump trucks and diggers and loaders. Along the way, they discover a dinosaur bone, which becomes the featured attraction of the new park.
Top dog Duke and his crew of construction-worker dogs are hard at work building a new park. They need lots of cool equipment to help them dig, haul, push, and plow-like a backhoe, dump truck, bulldozer, and grader. But what happens when the crew finds something unexpected buried deep in the ground? Beginning readers will love this I Can Read adventure starring a doggy construction crew! The text and art have been gently adapted from James Horvath's picture book of the same title. Dig, Dogs, Dig is a Level One I Can Read book, which means it's perfect for children…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I belong to a family of dog lovers – Oscar, the black cocker spaniel; Buddy, the brown-and-white beagle; Riley, the buff cocker spaniel; Buffy, a black boxer mix, Milo and Max, Golden retrievers. In fact, cavorting with Riley at a San Francisco park was my inspiration for Bark Park. I also love children, especially my grandchildren Connor and Kasey. When Kasey, at five years of age, read my book Bark Park aloud for the first time, my heart swelled with joy! It took me back to my own young daughter Laura whose first all-by-herself read-aloud had been: Go, dog, go! So it’s only natural for me to combine my two great loves – dogs and children – with these book recommendations.
This very easy early reader is a good choice for launching a child into reading. It follows Big Dog and Little Dog through their day as they eat, play, and – finally – sleep cuddled up together at night. This oh-so-simple story with its oh-so-simple illustrations provides a charming plot and a sense of reading mastery for the oh-so-very early young reader.
Big Dog and Little Dog are canine companions who stick together through thick and thin. In this, their first adventure, Big Dog and Little Dog are hungry! And as any good dog knows, friends who chow down together nap together.
I write children’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, including One Duck Stuck, Big Momma Makes the World, Rattletrap Car, Plant a Pocket of Prairie, and, in collaboration with Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum, Begin With A Bee, a picture book about the federally endangered rusty-patched bumblebee. Recently I have been putting my garden to bed for the winter, pulling tomato vines, harvesting beans that have dried on the vine, cutting herbs, and planting cloves of garlic to grow into heads in next year’s garden. In a couple of months snow will bury the garden beds, and the only gardens will be in the pages of books. Here are five of the children’s books that I love about growing things.
Told in one long sentence, this is the story of a child and their dog who plant seeds after winter and wait and wait and wait for the brown ground to–finally–become green. The ongoing sentence resonates with waiting for hopeful signs that spring is on the way.
Following a snow-filled winter, a young boy and his dog decide that they've had enough of all that brown and resolve to plant a garden. They dig, they plant, they play, they wait . . . and wait . . . until at last, the brown becomes a more hopeful shade of brown, a sign that spring may finally be on its way.
Julie Fogliano's tender story of anticipation is brought to life by the distinctive illustrations Erin E. Stead, recipient of the 2011 Caldecott Medal.
I went through major surgery when I was in eighth grade. The physical pain was bad, but what hurt more was the emotional side. When I returned to school, the friend groups had shifted, shutting me out because of my extended absence. I had to face that time in life alone. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to works about kids who have to face challenges on their own. When we go through hard times, our true selves come out. They have to; we have no one else. We can’t pretend. We can only try to make it. The books I like show characters that shine through their hardships.
First off, this book was written by a good friend of mine and I got to read early, early drafts of it. But more importantly, Myra, the main character, is in a special school on the Moon for kids with magic. Only, she doesn’t have magic. She has to try to fake her way through it.
That is, until she develops the wrong kind of magic. When she discovers she’s a Boton, all is lost. She could be put in jail for having plant magic–or worse. Myra isn’t very good at making friends, but she learns through this tough situation how to trust other people.
"Moongarden blooms with heart and adventure. A stellar update of The Secret Garden, woven with a little science fiction, a lot of magic, a vibrant heroine, and a plucky robot sidekick to rival R2-D2." —Victoria Aveyard, New York Times bestselling author of Red Queen
The Secret Garden meets The City of Ember. Failed climate change policy, an intergalactic conspiracy, and the magical, unlikely heroine who could unearth it all. An explosive STEAM-inspired series starter perfect for young change makers.
Centuries ago, Earth’s plants turned deadly, and humanity took to space to cultivate new homes. Myra Hodger is in her first…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the…
I’m not an expert gardener, but I’ve been gardening for half my life. Each spring I can’t wait to start all over again. I love deciding what vegetables to plant in our community garden and tucking flowers into the flower boxes. The perfect Saturday? Lingering at my local gardening center and perusing the seedlings at the farmer’s market—the possibilities are endless! As temperatures warm, I begin daily tours of my garden, looking for signs of life, pulling weeds, and tidying up. I marvel as the tulips bloom, scatter zinnia seeds, plant dahlia tubers, water, and wait. Gardening is perfectly predictable, yet I’m captivated by it every year.
After a long day spent digging in the dirt, I like to treat myself by going to bed early to read Diane Ackerman’sCultivating Delight.
Ackerman is known for going deep on the topics of the five senses, love, and, in this case, her garden, through the seasons.
With meandering musings about what’s growing in her backyard and meditations on the everyday tasks involved in maintaining her plot, Ackerman transports me to a lush, verdant place, providing just the rejuvenation I need to return to my garden the next day.
“Ackerman has done it again … one of the most buoyant and enjoyable garden reads … uplifting, intelligent.” — Boston Globe
In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons.
Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers.
Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take…
When I first saw an image of a Japanese garden, it was unlike anything I had seen before. I just knew I had to visit Japan to see the gardens and try to understand the culture that produced this artistry. I later had the opportunity to work for a small Japanese architecture firm in Tokyo. During those seven years, I explored gardens, landscapes, villages, and cities, trying to absorb as much of the culture as I could. Japanese gardens still fascinate me, and I love learning about contemporary designers and gardeners in Japan who are keeping the traditional spirit alive, while exploring what a garden can be in the present day.
Systematically tracing the origin and history of Japanese gardens back to China and the influences on Chinese gardens, this book provides a great basis for further digging into the foundations of Japanese gardens. It also carefully documents the historical development of gardens in Japan through the mid-twentieth century, situating Japanese garden design as a “vital artistic activity” that both connects to a particular time, place, and culture and transcends it.
I’ve loved comic strips since I was a kid, so children’s books that had cartoon art in them were the ultimate for me. That love drove me to research and write about the career and life of Jack Kent. Books by cartoonists tend to have the whole package: They tell a story visually, they’re funny, and they use language economically but memorably. The limitations I placed on myself in choosing this list were 1) the creator had to have both written and drawn the book, and 2) they had to have been established as a professional cartoonist before moving into children’s books.
Crockett Johnson worked as a cartoonist for Collier’s before his strip Barnaby first appeared in newspapers in 1942. He illustrated a couple of children’s books in the 1940s, before writing and drawing his minimalist ode to the power of creativity, Harold and the Purple Crayon.
He’d do six more books about Harold, but for my money the best is the second one, in which Harold visits a castle, and has to do all sorts of creative problem solving to defeat a witch. The ending – in which Harold returns home and asks his mother to read him a story – is a cozy happily ever after.
From the treasured creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson, comes another adventure for Harold and his magical purple crayon.
Unable to fall asleep one night, Harold uses his purple crayon to create his very own bedtime fairy tale, complete with castles, fairies, flying carpets, and an enchanted garden.
“An ingenious and original little picture story in which a small boy out for a walk—happily with a crayon in his hand—draws himself some wonderful adventures.” (The Horn Book)
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregón and her ambitious husband, Raúl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl,…
All my writing starts with the question, How did we get here? As the granddaughter of a grocer and the daughter of a food editor, I grew up wondering about the quest for new and better foods—especially when other people began saying “new” and “better” were contradictions. Which is better, native or imported? Heirloom or hybrid? Our roses today are patented, and our food supplies are dominated by multi-national seed companies, but not very long ago, the new sciences of evolution and genetics promised an end to scarcity and monotony. If we explore the sources of our gardens, we can understand our world. That‘s what I tried to do in The Garden of Invention, and that’s why I recommend these books.
This gorgeous and touching book shows the many ways community gardens are more than a name—they build community. In a time when it’s so easy to feel helpless, here are ordinary people taking small steps with a big impact. I particularly loved the use of community garden time as alternative sentencing for teen offenders, and how the kids turned around and used their skills to help homebound seniors.
Fifteen people plus a class of first graders tell how local food, farms, and gardens changed their lives and their community . . . and how they can change yours, too. Urban Farming Handbook includes: Fifteen first-person stories of personal and civic transformation from a range of individuals, including farmers and community garden members, a low-income senior and a troubled teen, a foodie, a food bank officer, and many more Seven in-depth "How It Works" sections on student farms, community gardens, community-supported agriculture (CSA), community education, farm work therapy, community outreach, and more Detailed information on dozens of additional resources…
