Beautiful - Susi Gregg Fowler

by Tristi Pinkston | More from this Blogger

06 Jun 2007 04:32 PM

In "Beautiful" by the husband and wife team of Susi Gregg Fowler and illustrator Jim Fowler, we hear the story of Uncle Jim, who is a gardener. He has a special talent for taking plants and making them into something beautiful. He not only has a garden of his own, but he hires out to care for gardens all over town. On his nephew's birthday, he gives him gardening tools, seeds, and wire, and shows him how to plant a garden of his very own.

As the plants are put into the earth, the nephew realizes that Uncle Jim isn't helping him much. Uncle Jim explains that he's very tired. He's sick and will be going away soon for treatment, but he wants his nephew to have a garden all of his very own to be remembered by.

Uncle Jim does go away. I assume it's for cancer treatment, but the book doesn't actually say. The garden grows while he's gone, and he occasionally sends postcards with suggestions for how to care for the plants. The nephew paints pictures of his garden and sends them to Uncle Jim, who thinks they're beautiful.

Uncle Jim does come home, but he's lost his hair and wears a hat now. He moves in with his nephew's family, and they are able to spend his remaining time admiring the garden and appreciating the wonder of beauty all around them. We are left with the strong hint that Uncle Jim didn't live much longer, but the book ends before his actual passing. To me, it was a nice correlation between life and spring, nature and death, how seeds are planted, grow up, and then die, just like people, but how we all bring so much beauty into the world.

(This book was published in 1998 by Greenwillow Books.)

A Garden of Their Own

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I've been a blogger for Families.com since August of 2006.

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