Green: The Story of Plant Life on Our Planet

by Nicola Davies, Emily Sutton (Illustrator)

Overview

Take a lively look at the biology of plants on Earth—and their vast importance to our planet—with this wide-ranging exploration from an award-winning team.

This tree doesn’t look like it’s doing very much.
It just stands there in the sunlight,
big and GREEN.
But in fact, this tree is busy . . .

On land and in the seas, green plants make the oxygen and food that many living things—including us—need to survive. Covering the evolution of the first plants billions of years ago, the secret, microscopic workings of trees and leaves today, and the role of plants in both creating fossil fuels and combating climate change, this book is a lush and fascinating introduction to the science of plants that goes well beyond photosynthesis. Nicola Davies and Emily Sutton, the acclaimed team behind Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes, Many: The Diversity of Life on Earth, and Grow: Secrets of Our DNA, have crafted a hopeful exploration of green life that will encourage readers to treasure the flora of Earth’s many ecosystems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536231410
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Series:	Our Natural World
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	676,583
Product dimensions:	10.19(w) x 11.63(h) x 0.38(d)
Age Range:	5 - 8 Years

About the Author

Nicola Davies is a zoologist and award-winning author whose many books for children include Surprising Sharks, illustrated by James Croft, Extreme Animals, illustrated by Neal Layton, and Gaia Warriors, as well as several titles illustrated by Emily Sutton, including Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes, Many: The Diversity of Life on Earth, and Grow: Secrets of Our DNA. She lives in Wales.

Emily Sutton graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a degree in illustration. She is the illustrator of Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes, Many: The Diversity of Life on Earth, Grow: Secrets of Our DNA, and A First Book of the Sea, all by Nicola Davies, as well as The Christmas Eve Tree by Delia Huddy and Betty and the Mysterious Visitor by Anne Twist. In addition to illustrating picture books, she paints, sculpts, and designs prints. Emily Sutton lives in York, England.

Editorial Reviews

The meaning of “green” is creatively expanded from the color we associate with plants to encompass the process of photosynthesis and the components of plant cells in which it takes place. . . . Sutton’s lush illustrations, naturally featuring many shades of green, fill the pages with tendrils, roots, and leaves at macro and micro scales and portray ecosystems on land and water throughout Earth’s history as teeming with plants and animals.
—The Horn Book

A cogent reminder of the significance of plants, for oxygen breathers of all species.
—Kirkus Reviews

Green is the color of life in this informative picture book, specifically the green of chloroplasts doing the hard work of photosynthesis. Introduced with a helpful close-up on the layers of a tree leaf, their importance is established with a similarly useful diagram tracing the food sources of various creatures, all of which eventually lead back to plants. . . . Green appropriately dominates the palette, and the gentle blending and dapples of the watercolor and acrylic art have a comfy, welcoming vibe.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

A conservationist ethos infuses this scientific introduction to the critical role that plant life plays in regulating Earth’s climate. Beginning with a single tree, Davies’s gently scientific text talks through photosynthesis. . . A pale-skinned child appears occasionally as a visual guide throughout Sutton’s signature-style watercolor and acrylic paintings, which blend varied verdant hues in overgrown scenes of vegetation throughout this appreciative work on the abundant value of “green.”
—Publishers Weekly

Lush landscapes and urgent environmental insights unite in this offering for young readers that emphasizes the critical role plants play in the health of our vulnerable environment. . . . zoologist-author Davies and illustrator Sutton make their message here quite clear: “GREEN is the most important color in the world.”. . . Davies presents green as far more than just a color and offers a time line to contextualize the eons it took to create a healthy ecosystem and the climate-change precipice on which we now teeter.
—Booklist

From the Publisher

2023-12-16
A basic introduction to the role plants play in supplying oxygen and trapping excess carbon dioxide.

Davies has a simple message to deliver. To get there, she first takes a close look at leaf structure and photosynthesis, then goes back four billion years to retrace the development of life from the first green microorganisms to the Carboniferous Period and the formation of fossil fuels. Today, she writes, our planet is covered with “great green nations” of plants that work with fauna and fungi to lock back up the carbon we’ve thoughtlessly released over the past few centuries, which is heating the planet and “messing up the weather.” But those natural communities, threatened by habitat destruction and plastic pollution, need our assistance. Readers will have to look elsewhere for hints about concrete ways to help, but our urgent need to act comes through loud and clear. Over a running timeline, Sutton fashions land- and seascapes teeming with plants and animals (or, in one urban vista, cars and smoke-belching factories) on the way to final views of racially diverse children climbing a tree, including a light-skinned youngster who stays behind to reflect on the author’s conclusion: “GREEN is the most important color in the world.”

A cogent reminder of the significance of plants, for oxygen breathers of all species. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews