My Favorite Gardening Books for Kids

My motto in life is: you can never have enough books! Ever since our first child was born, I've loved diving into the worlds of children's books, most specifically nature, gardening, and environment ones. Kids are such little sponges and it's never too early to start indoctrinating them into becoming budding environmentalists and gardeners — the world needs more of them! At the time of publishing this list of my favorite gardening books for kids, my children are soon-to-be-three and just-turned-five, so this list runs the gamut from some baby board books to longer books for older children.

I'll keep this updated throughout the years as we add more to our library, and I am always eager to hear recommendations from you all — so please feel free to share your favorites in the comments! I recently purchased a used copy of the book Miss Rumphius, after learning about her from a friend while we were visiting Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens recently. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of the book before and immediately sought out a copy on ThriftBooks.

At the end of this article, I've also included a list of crowd-sourced gardening books from recommendations I got on Threads and Substack — I'll add more suggestions below as I hear of them!

Please note that most of the links direct you to Bookshop.org, my preferred website for buying new books. Occasionally, if I couldn't find a book on there, I've linked to Amazon instead. Of course, my favorite way to procure any book is on ThriftBooks, but I know sometimes links can be wonky there and items can be out of stock. Just a heads up as to the rhyme and reason of the link sourcing!

Pssst: If you are embarking on your own gardening journey alongside your kids, I think you'd find my How to Start a Garden as a Total Beginner post helpful!

My Favorite Tried-and-True Gardening Books For Kids

• A Seed Grows: My First Look at a Plant's Life Cycle by Pamela Hickman and Heather Collins
• Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
• The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
• Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
• What's Inside a Flower by Rachel Ignotofsky
• First 1000 Nature Words
• Secrets of the Vegetable Garden: A Shine-a-Light Book by Carron Brown and Giordano Poloni
• The Girl Who Loves Bugs by Lily Murray and Jenny Løvlie
• Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals and Ashley Wolff
• In a Garden by Tim McCanna
• Birder's Logbook: A Seek-and-Sticker Book for Budding Ornithologists
• Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal
• The Earth Gives More by Sue Fliess and Christiane Engel
• Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children by Sharon Lovejoy
• Rachel Carson and Her Book That Changed the World by Laurie Lawlor
• We Are the Gardeners by Joanna Gaines
• The Honeybee by Kirsten Hall
• 1000 Things in Nature
• Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl
• The Little Gardener by Jan Gerardi
• The Gardener by Sarah Stewart
• Celia Planted a Garden by Phyllis Root and Gary Schmidt
• A Seed is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston
• The Big Book of Blooms by Yuval Zommer
• The Big Book of Birds by Yuval Zommer
• The Big Book of Belonging by Yuval Zommer
• The Secret World of Plants: Tales of More Than 100 Remarkable Flowers, Trees, and Seeds by Ben Hoare
• Nature's Treasures: Tales Of More Than 100 Extraordinary Objects From Nature by Ben Hoare
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
• Mrs. Peanuckle's Flower Alphabet
• Mrs. Peanuckle's Bug Alphabet
• Mrs. Peanuckle's Vegetable Alphabet
• Mrs. Peanuckle's Organic Farm Alphabet

Gardening Community Favorites

• Tree of Life by Rochelle Strauss
• Harlem Grow: How One Big Idea Transformed a Neighborhood by Tony Hillery and Jessie Hartland
• From Plant to Plate by Darryl Gadzekpo and Ella Phillips
• Before We Eat by Pat Brisson
• How Does My Garden Grow? by Gerda Muller
• Sleep Tight Farm by Eugenie Doyle
• Sonya's Chickens by Rhoebe Wahl
• When We Went Wild by Isabella Tree
• The Farm That Feeds Us by Nancy Castaldo
• The Wild by Yuval Zommer
• In the Tall, Tall Grass by Denise Fleming
• Have You Heard the Nesting Bird? by Rita Gray
• Is an Egg Quiet? by Dianna Aston
• Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni
• Fungus is Among Us by Joy Keller
• Amara and the Bats by Emma Reynolds
• This is the Tree We Planted by Kate McMullan