Book reviews

FUN THINGS TO DO WITH PLANTS

Author: Alys Fowler Illustrator: Heidi Griffiths Publisher: Bloomsbury Price: £9.99 / $15.49 Release: Out now

Any botanist or green-fingered gardener will tell you that the fruit and vegetables readily available in the supermarket are only a fraction of the edible plants that you can grow in your garden, or forage for in the wild. Nasturtiums, for example, are a common species of pretty flowers that come in various shades of yellow and red, and are completely edible: root, leaves, flower – the lot. They have a nice, peppery flavour that works well in salads, and you’ll sometimes see celebrity chefs use them on the television.

If you’re not much for growing your own food then that fact might come as a surprise to you, and there’s more of this kind of revelation in Alys Fowler’s Grow, Forage and Make. It’s very much a hands-on guide to using the garden not just as a vegetable plot, but for wildlife spotting, cultivating eco-friendly habitats and even making your own paper.

Each turn of the page introduces new ideas for making use of the space that’s literally on your doorstep, with how-to guides on foraging for roots, making gardening implements, encouraging beneficial insects and, of course, growing a variety of tasty crops. There’s even a handful of art projects that use garden plants, and not just your garden-variety flower pressing.

These projects and activities are in a similar format to our own How To’s in the back pages of

How It Works, except the illustrations here are even more attractive than they are functional. Artist Heidi Griffiths has paid as much attention to the incidental details – ivy emerging from the corners and insects buzzing about the pages – as she does to illustrating each step of each project's instructions. It gives the whole book a suitably organic feel and gives younger readers something to seek out each time they dive into a new activity. This is an ideal home-learning tool for any household with a garden, plot or allotment, and there’s plenty in Grow, Forage and Make for adults as well.

There’s even a handful of art projects that use garden plants