A Kaleidoscope of Sensory Pleasures and Forgotten Childhood Treasures are Found in the Garden - Interview with Sharon Lovejoy

Ginny: Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast, I am thrilled today to have a special, a very special guest who has really influenced our family, Sharon Lovejoy Sharon, thank you so much for being here. 

Sharon: I'm so glad to finally meet you and well, sort of in person.

Ginny: We've met online a little bit through Instagram and through e-mailing, but it's really a pleasure to be sitting across from you, face-to-face. Sharon has written many books. The one that influenced us right off the bat is called, “Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots,” which is such a clever title - activities to do in the garden and this book just changed our life. We're going to be talking about that and Sharon's other books. She's got a lot of them. 

So let me tell you about Sharon. Sharon is a natural born storyteller and an award winning author and illustrator for works in fiction and creative nonfiction include 10 books ranging from children's picture books to adult and children's organic gardening books, magazine articles about nature and gardening, and most recently, a a historic middle grade novel, which we have that one beautiful book. She graduated with distinction in the field of art from San Diego State University and successfully combined her training in art with her love of botany and natural science. And you have quite the set of accomplishments here - I mean, a docent, a naturalist and for the Morro Bay Museum of Natural History for the Smithsonian Institution Institution, a guest on the Today show and The Victory Garden on PBS, numerous shows on the Discovery Channel. I mean this is a list! You are just impacting the world.

Sharon: You know, I just try to keep busy. 

Sharon: Oh yes, yes, I can tell. So ten books, and I have eight of them. I don't have “My First Bird Book and Bird Feeder”, which I looked up, and it is super cute. It's a book where you learn about the different birds and it's actually like a little bird house. And then I don't have, “A Day in the Garden, The Illustrated Journal.” But besides those, I've got the other eight and they’ve changed my life. Oh, that's so glad.

Sharon: Oh, I’m so glad. Well, they said they sold out of the bird book. So you can't get it. 

Ginny: I noticed that.

Sharon:  It was all about getting kids up close and personal with birds, so hopefully I will get it published without the bird house. 

Ginny: I have eight of them. And so my story that led me to you… my parents are avid gardeners and my grandparents grew up on farms. And my parents have a beautiful garden in their backyard. My in-laws, the same thing -  and I just wasn't something that interested me for a very long time.

I remember as a child, my mom would always ask, “What flower is this one?” I didn't know. I wasn't interested, but once I had kids, I started to become more interested in trying with them, trying different gardening things. And I was really overwhelmed. 

Sharon, I didn't know the terminology, you know, I didn't know anything. I didn't know “germinate,” and I didn't understand, you know, how to figure out when to plant - all of these different things. And it seems like it would be easy, just plop on a seed in the ground. But then there was “plant this by that,” and it just sort of was this confluence of confusion.

And I had read a lot of gardening books, but still felt very nervous to try for whatever reason. And I think when you first start, it can be a little more expensive. You don't have anything. And so I was nervous to try, I hadn't really done much gardening. My midwife told me about your book, “Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots”, and I think she sold that. She had a little store. She sold it there and I bought it, and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love.

I have this vivid memory of being out to dinner with my husband, we didn't go out to dinner very much. Our kids are kind of clingy, but we had them over at my in-laws and we went out for dinner and I had just gotten your book, and I don't think I talked to him the whole meal. I just had a little pencil and I was mesmerized by the ideas and by the illustrations. I'm going to hold one up here. 

What it did for me was it helped me reframe. I can do this with my kids and we're going to learn. So this picture is a sunflower house, which you do all your illustrations, right, Sharon? 

Sharon: Right? I do. 

Ginny: Just to look through these books. This has got this little saying, one that twists around inside the sunflower, it says, 

“All summer long, we  hid and played in the sunflower house’s dappled shade. A roof of morning glory vines, twisted, tangled intertwined. And close beside us, rustling leaves had conversations with the breeze.”

Wow, this is what you need. 

Sharon: I love writing children's poetry. 

Ginny: So it reframed it for me. Instead of feeling like, “Oh, I might be old or I don't really know what I'm doing.” It was like, “Oh, I should try this.” It felt like this invitation and made it seem easy and magical and something that was magnetic. 

Sharong: Because you wrote to me and I started following you and watching how much joy you got from just your zinnias alone. It is a magical thing and it costs virtually nothing to introduce your kids to this and to have real adventures together. 

Ginny: Yeah. Real adventures. We just went through our third summer of planting. You have this list in your book of the easy things. So the first year I think we tried radishes and zinnias and we tried Morning Glories. That was our first year and then the second year, which was last summer we planted gourds, and that was great. I tell you, I can't even really describe the amount of joy that it is for such a little amount of money. There is magic from the very beginning, the sprout all the way through the harvest and then you dream again, right? I just got an e-mail yesterday from Baker Creek Seeds about their catalog for 2021 comes out in November and you can order it now. 

Sharon: Oh, yeah, that's a great catalog. I loved just reading those catalogs and absorbing knowledge of the ages. And you know, they're just incredibly filled with the knowledge and the heart of all those gardener people that try things out. So those are good. That's a good introduction, too. 

Ginny: And I remember my grandma having them. I think back then you had to order it on a piece of paper and mail it in. And back then I wasn't interested, but I do remember her having those and I got my first one this past year. And just like you said, there's so much. It's like a book. 

Sharon: It is. Didn't you grow moon and star watermelon? 

Ginny: Yes, we did. And the other thing it opened up my eyes. I realized the amount of variety - these bigger melons and then Tigger melons, they're the size of a baseball, striped like a tiger. Morning glories. And then the zinnias, same thing. It's all these different varieties. I didn't realize that you could grow a white pumpkin, ghost pumpkin.

Sharon: You're really growing, you're growing a whole new generation of gardeners. And that's the important thing. It's not how well your zinnias did or when you got fungus on a plant, it's that your kids get to go through all of this. The ups, the downs, the excitement, the discoveries, and you're growing a whole new generation of what's really important, especially in these times. 

Ginny: Yeah, I love that. And I think what I learned is that you can have so much joy even if it fails, even if so much of it doesn't go well. One year I had planted a bunch of zinnias and we had chickens and they scratched them up and we only grew three but we still got a bunch of flowers and they flowered into October here in Michigan, and it brought us so much. That's what I've learned, and I think it's such a good parallel for life. 

Sharon: You know, our kids have to understand that everything isn't perfect, like on a computer game where you can work through things, life is not that way at all, and a garden sure isn't that way from the ground up. It can be really a challenge. And if they're not resilient, if they don't face those challenges, they're not going to make it in life. 

Ginny: So, yeah, it's a really good parallel. I have a stack again. And I've got eight of them, so what I'm hoping is to talk through these books because. I think as parents, we buy a lot of resources for our kids and often we don't use them. 

But your books are books that we have really used, and what I can't even really comprehend is how much is packed into these books. So I want to start with this “Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots.” This was my first. This is my first foray into your books and then we’ll get to all the rest because I love them so much. 

Sharon does all the illustrations for these. I mean, and they are whimsical. So these are fun books for adults and for kids, which I love even the table of contents. I'm going to have to get people to come look at the YouTube video. 

I mean, the table of contents. There's so much detail here, Sharon. I love that you see in the introduction, you say, “all knowledge is rooted in wonder. And what better place to cultivate wonder than in our own gardens?”

So this is such a beautiful book. We've tried so many of the ideas we've tried the Sunflower House and you just go page by page and there's so much here in these beautiful illustrations like these pumpkins. Look how pretty those are. 

So I put in a couple of little pieces of paper to kind of guide me through what you talk about. Let me grab one little section. You talk about,

“Gourds are Mother Nature's all purpose plants, from bird houses to bath sponges, drums to dolls. A garden draped in gourds can supply children with endless hours of fun and discoveries. Small ornamental mix gourds are perfect. Dried out plants will quickly engulf a play house or teepee with vines and a blaze of papery, star-shaped blossoms. 

One packet of seeds will produce colorful oddities that will look like apples, pears, oranges, warty monsters and strange crowns studded with thorns.

Children “treasure hunt” for the ugliest, strangest, scariest and prettiest offspring.”

I mean, that is just three three paragraphs out of this book. It changed my life because I wanted to do that. I want to get the one packet of gourds, you know, and do the treasure hunt. And like I say, it's just one little thing in the whole book. You get so much out of it. So tell us about Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots. When did this one come out? Do you have a favorite part in there? 

Sharon: \This took a long time to write because my publisher, Workman Publishing, wanted a book from me, but they didn't know what they wanted and I wanted a children's book. And when you saw the discovery walks inside the book, where the kids go out and they taste something, or they see the little tomatoes, well, I think I spent three years writing, not just paragraphs, but books for Workman, and I would submit them and they go, “No.”

And then one morning I got up and I did a discovery walk because that's what I did with my son every day from about the time he was 10 days old. I thought, “Why didn't I think of this that day?” They said, “That's what we want. We want that sense of discovery on every page.” 

So first thing I had to do was to make it simple to give people the easy things to grow. And that's what you mentioned a few minutes ago. The top 20 plants for kids. It was fun, you know, it was fun just combing through everything and figuring out the ones. I think I just sent you the article about our teaching garden. I tested everything out in there and I could watch children and how they responded to things. And, you know, it was everyday learning for me to. 

The top 20 plants were really important. And the discovery walks and things like learning that a four o'clock really opens at four o'clock. I did a flower clock. I started with the pizza patch because that's the favorite food of children, and they don't have to just be pepperoni and sausage. 

We did a party once at our house for children, and we did, from appetizers to desserts, every single course was a different pizza. One was all fruits and whipped cream and powdered sugar and everything. So I started with the pizza patch, that was to get the kids involved. 

And then I did rainy day activities for those days that you can't go outside when you might want to make markers or something. I tell a little bit of the history of everything that's in the garden because plants have an ancient history and lineage.

Ginny: There is more in this book if you look. I mean, just like you said, it's interesting that they said they wanted a book with just this sense of discovery on every page and there is.

Sharon: Well, that's what I wanted too. You know, I have to admit, I get really bored when I read most guidebooks: “Plant the plants six inches apart, one quarter inch deep. Make sure your rows are straight.”

I think their rules are made to be broken, sometimes. Children, they want to go out and toss things, and they'll learn that if they toss too many together, they're not going to grow. They'll be too congested. You know, so it's all a learning process and it's all discovery. It is all discovery. 

Ginny: I flipped open to this page - Evening Stake Out. So this is a discovery walk. I mean, this just draws you in, Sharon. 

Sharon: I've always loved to take night walks. Jeff and I have detectors so we can hear the sonar, the bats as they approach.

Ginny: I didn’t know there was such a thing. 

Sharon: Yeah, that detector. Although the bats are certainly not doing too well right now. But we have a bat detector and we love to walk at night and look at the constellations, and I thought, children are afraid to go out at night. 

And if you take a child out in a garden with a wonderful flashlight and maybe with some red acetate over it so that it doesn't scare things and you can see things, you can learn so much. 

At night we took a night bug class, Jeff and I did, and they had painted the moth broth on a tree trunk. And then they focused a light on the tree trunk and they put a sheet underneath it. And there were, I don't know, maybe two dozen or three dozen different varieties of critters that we got to look at, catch and look at up close and go to a sunflower head. 

This is busy with bees during the day, and there might be 20 different, incredible moths feeding on it at night, though each one of those secretions of nectar, they're incredible. So I think nighttime is really important. You know, I understand that some people live in dangerous areas, but going out and discovering what's going on under the stars is an eye opener.

Ginny: I remember the moth broth. The moth broth is in this book. 

Sharon: It's in this one. Yes. 

Ginny: The illustrations are just gorgeous. Here's the recipe. It's a magical drawing, right? I love that about the book because you just want to do it, you know? I found the moth broth. A child could look at the pictures, you know, a young child, a toddler. You know, you've got the picture of the different things to do. 

I remember my mom as a kid bought Highlights Magazines. It would have the words, but then it would have the picture. And so she would read that one little part of the story. 

You write like a little kid could do this with you. 

Sharon: When I wrote “The Little Green Island with a Little Red House”, I decided I wanted it to be a rebus, which I grew up with things like the little red hen. So there would be the picture and the word, and I associated and learned how to read that way. So “Little Green Island with a Little Red House” that's why that is a rebus, so that kids can easily say the word and rhyme it.

Ginny: I've got that one. You have all sorts of different kinds of books. 

Sharon: I do, because I like to do different things. I get bored when I do the same thing. The only thing I do over and over is stay married to my husband. 

So if you read the rhyming scheme of “The Little Green Island with a Little Red House,” you see that it's made to accommodate the mind of a child so they can. I was never allowed to touch the lines of a book when my grandmother was teaching me to read. So I figured that a rebus would help the kids. They'd see a house in a mouse and they could catch that whole thing. 

Ginny: Yeah. This has been a favorite book in our house. Once again, I'm holding this up in the YouTube video.

Sharon: That's when I hear, those birds sing from midnight on. That's when I hear the birds. So you see I think the song Sparrow and the Robin, they're the first singers that I hear in the morning or the owl is the first thing I hear hooting. They come out in my life at those times and the grasshopper, and I wanted kids to realize that all hours of the day and night you can hear all these different voices of things. And it is another case of magic. It really is magical. 

Ginny: Yeah, it is. So this was a 2015 National Outdoor Book Award winner, The Little Green Island with a Little Red House, A Book of Colors and Critters. So this podcast is going to be coming out right around the holiday season. Such a cute little stocking stuffer… “The Little Green Island and a Little Red House,” and all the colors and illustrations are beautiful. I don't think that there are many authors who have a bunch of different types of books. You've got the middle grade novel, you've got this children's book. 

Sharon: I wish you could see the pile that I'm working on now. I am enchanted by life. And if you're enchanted by life - yesterday, I spent the whole day out looking at mushrooms, lichens and mosses on Great Spruce Head Island, and I was led by a man who is a Ph.D. in psychology, so I got a worm's eye view of mushrooms and I loved it. I'm enchanted by so many facets of life that I can't imagine only writing one kind of thing. I have six things waiting - Jeff's going to be sending off.

I want to give you an example in my book Camp Granny. I spent years trying to get all the different bird words that the bird said and all that and both day and night, so that the kids could go out and hear the birds and maybe say, “Feed me, feed me.” That's a chickadee. They say, “Feed me.” So it's, you know, it's just holding everything close to my heart and wanting to share it. And that's why I loved being a docent at the museum and sharing the wonder of nature with adults and children. 

Because I had a woman who said to me she was 97, and she said, if it's indeed true to, it's never too late to be a child at heart. This will be my best spring ever. 

Ginny: And I do think gardening gives that to us. It uses the air, like a sense of excitement, or unknown ,or wonder. What's going to happen? 

Sharon: That's right. What's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen tonight? And plant a poppy. We'll let the children plant a poppy and let them watch it escape from its casing. And it's just amazing to have the kids watch the poppy slowly open. You know, it's a magical thing. Yeah, I to overuse that word, but it is.

Ginny: It brings this freshness into life. I love that story about the 97 year old. My best spring ever. Isn't that how we all hope our lives go? 

Sharon: And it touched my heart. It really did. 

I started leading elder walks, Explorer exploration walks. They're just as excited as children. You don't have to be five, you can be 95. And if it means something new, discovering something. 

Ginny: And I think that's a really special thing about nature. There isn't much else like it. You know, there's very little literature that kids and adults like. There's very few movies that kids and adults like - but most of the time we're pretty separate, right? You know, my kids like games that I don't know. I don't like to play Candy Land. I'm in love with nature - from newborn, all the way through the oldest of ages. 

Sharon: I started taking my son Noah out, who, by the way, is a fabulous gardener, fabulous gardener. I started taking him out when he was 10 days old, and I grew a lot of scented geraniums, and I would put his hand on the peppermint and then put it up by his nose, and you could see him respond to it. So, you know, they're totally there when they're using all five of their senses and one of the gardens that I loved making was the Five Senses Garden that invited children in to touch, to taste, to smell. So it involves all your senses and what you said about Candyland. I'm not a great game player. In fact, I'm kind of a bad game player, but you want you're still when you're doing that, you're in parallel time with the children. You're both connected. Your heads are bumping together. You're passing things back and forth. It's different, totally different. 

Ginny: Because you both like it and you're both getting things out of it. I think it's just, you know, it's something that connects all the generations. And so it's such a special thing. All right. I’ve got “A Blessing of Toads.”

Sharon: The original pictures were in color, but that book was really from my daily gardening and my experiences with the birds and my experiences with the toads. And for me, I love research, so I spent a lot of time researching, 93 to 2006. So many times a year, I'd write a column and I'd get hundreds of letters and people asking questions. So that's just sort of my personal take on how to do different kinds of gardens like the Scarecrow Garden with the Potato Head scarecrow that looks like a bird of prey. You know, that's an Amish thing. And you know, I just love doing the research for each piece and just getting the kids involved in it. Then that's a book for Grown-Ups and children.

Ginny: I want to read a quick paragraph. It says,

“Tomatoes produce their best crops when they are sonicated, or vibrated by bumblebees. Sonication is a fancy name for what I call the bumblebee rumba, a rough and tumble dance that will be the most hesitant of tomatoes to set fruit.”

I have learned so much from these books, Sharon. A Blessing of Toads also talks about moonwort, which we haven't tried yet. But you talk about how kids use moonwort for earrings and coins like, can we talk about moonwort?

Sharon: They're so easy to grow, you can get those seeds. I've got them all over my garden. They're what I call a Tagalong Plant. When we moved from Cambria, where we had our teaching garden in the town, a certain plant started coming up that came from my friend's garden. Mrs Squibb, she was in her 90s and one of those was Moon Wart or Moon Plant or Money Plant - it has a lot of names. It's a biennial. So the first year you might only get just a little cluster plant. In the second year, you'll get a cluster with a pink bloom on it, and then you just can watch the whole process as it grows and grows. And then it sets these beautiful pods, and if I were at home in California, I'd have a cluster of the pods here and kids love playing with them and we made crowns out of them. That's an easy peasy and that's one of my top 20 plants. I believe it’s in “Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Roots.” People really need to try that one. 

Ginny: You talk about I mean, in one paragraph with hundreds of ideas, the more is irresistible to children as sunflowers are full of finches. When kids discover the right thing in the garden, they immediately know they are rich. I mean, how far? And then you said you use more as fairy dishes and platters or pretend parties. You know, you talk about thimble sized servings of salad with flower petals and dessert is a lemon pie, the center is a daisy. So, I mean, once again, this book right here is just filled with wonder and ideas. A Blessing of Toads, A Guide to Living with Nature. So it looks different than the other ones it looks more like than like a novel, 

Sharon: and it has a lot of pages. 

Ginny: full of magic. 

Sharon: In Camp Granny, they sent a photographer from New York to Connecticut to California to photograph some of my gardens, and I do have Moon Wart. The kids made the little lampshades made out of plants. And so, you know, people can see how you can use those for fairy tea parties and for fairy houses and everything. 

Ginny: Yeah. These really are very different gardening books because like I said, I had bought a bunch of different gardening books and I finished them and just felt overwhelmed or like, this is over my head. There's too much to know. I shouldn't even get started, but with yours I am just inspired. I want to do all of these things. You know, I can't wait for another gardening season. I can't wait to plan. And um, so I've got I've got the “Toad Cottages and Shooting Stars”

Sharon: which is “Camp Granny.” They have just been published under two different names. They changed it, “Toad Cottages and Shooting Stars” to “Camp Granny,” which I didn't really want because this is definitely not for just grannies - Waldorf teachers, home schoolers, everybody uses Camp Granny because it's got so many learning tools in it, so many projects. So to me, it's still Toad Cottages and Shooting Stars but we'll call it Camp Granny here. 

Ginny: So if people want to find it, they can find it under Camp Granny. This one has color photos mixed in with illustrations.

Sharon: The reason being that I sent many hundreds of paintings in and a substitute worker accidentally threw them away. So in order to come out on time, they sent out a photographer to make up for the deficit. But I really like that because it's a family album. Those are my grandchildren, making lemonade out of lemons. And I like it better than I ever dreamed I could. 

Ginny: I like it because it's different, and I think that kids see things like this, you know, they see an image like that, and they can imagine themselves in it. I did not know that story. So your paintings were completely lost? 

Sharon: They were gone. And it's so weird because my young grandson saw me a few days after I found out about it and he said, “Mama, I dreamed that all your paintings were floating in the ocean.” He said that and I said, “Ooh, I wonder if they dumped him in the ocean, but that he knew somehow that my things were gone.” Isn't that weird? But it worked out because now I have this - they've captured the children in time. They're grown up now, and my granddaughter, Sarah, is on the front cover. It's very important for a child who's half Chinese to see a book that's relevant to her that shows somebody that looks like her. 

Ginny: Wow, what a story. I mean, I think a lot of times on this podcast, you know, we're talking to authors and different people, and I think it's important to know people's stories. This is hard. I mean, to get the phone call that all your work has been accidentally thrown out, I mean, that's devastating. 

Sharon: I sort of crawled into the fetal position and covered up and Jeff said, “Come on, Sharon, don't be a chicken. Get up.” So yeah, it was hard. It was. It's gone forever. But I do have those photos of the kids doing the actual projects that I wrote about. So I'm happy. Yeah. 

Ginny: So this Camp Granny, like you said, this has the one with the bird words in here. This is a book for families. It's for grandparents, but it's also for teachers and for parents. We homeschool, so this has got great resources for us, so many different craft ideas. 

I put a little marker in the Firefly Lantern page. There's just so much to learn here. “The fireflies, called glow worms are bioluminescent, which means they emit light.” I mean, what a great vocabulary word. You talk about how in some cultures, fireflies are tucked into carved or it uses natural lanterns, and that each species has its own sequence intensity and a rhythm of flashing. “Don't forget to release them before the night is over.” You read a couple of lines in there. It's so rich in information. 

Sharon: So I have that dream of going to the fireflies in Tennessee that all flash at the same time, millions of fireflies, all at the same time, can you imagine? 

Ginny: Oh that would be so cool to see. How do they do that? They flash at the same time? 

Sharon: All of them. Millions of them. Yeah. You take your family down there. You have to get tickets and you sit in the dark and chairs. And that's my dream next July. I really want to do that. So that's in Tennessee. I love things like how to make your backyard critter friendly in Camp Granny. 

Sharon: Oh yes, yes. 

Ginny: I like easy projects for kids. You know on page 42, 43 to bring different kinds of hummingbirds and butterflies and how to attract birds. I really love that. I love being able to do that and to teach kids how simple it is, how simple it is to provide a habitat for them. 

Sharon: Yeah. 

Ginny: And this one is filled with recipes. The same thing. Like even on the recipe page, there's so much information. So Cindy Rankin's dump cake and you talk about flavored sugars with petals. 

Sharon: Yeah. Oh, I love the frog on a lily pad, which is on page 82, where the kids learn about making eggs in bread, frying them and all that. 

Ginny: Yes, this one has all sorts of fun recipes with a bunch of extras. Please play with your food and how to make caterpillars out of cucumbers. 

And then you just have all these other with a picture of a butter and a knife - the word is in there, so they have to use the picture 

Sharon: That's Rebus, where the kids can put the word in. It's like a mystery or treasure hunt for them to see a thing and be able to say the word without knowing how to read. 

Ginny: I love it. They get to be included. There are all sorts of ideas here for breakfast. Breakfast, lunch, dinner ideas. And once again, this is really special that you ended up having the photos. 

Sharon: Yes. And they're so wonderful. And they didn't really know what they were doing. They worked hard for a few days of shooting, but now they have something to show for it. They can look back and say, “Oh, I was really young when I did that.” 

Ginny: So this is a fabulous book, with the holidays coming up. You can find it under Camp Granny, but what a fun gift for a grandparent or a parent or a new parent or a teacher. It's just filled with awesome ideas and beautiful photos. I don't even know how you come up with all this stuff. OK, so this one, I loved “Trowel and Error,” which is such a clever title. I love that. “Trowel and Error, Over 700 Organic Remedies, Shortcuts and Tips for the Gardener.” So this one's been really helpful for me as a new gardener. But also, I think this probably hits all the levels, right? It has ideas for people who have been doing it for a long time. 

So I stuck a little note in here about how to hasten the ripening of squash and melons. There are just so many ideas, over 700.

Sharon: You know, I wrote maybe four hundred and fifty pages and my editor said to me, “Sharon, people don't want a seven course meal they want horderves. You're going to have to cut some of this.” So that's why it's only 200 pages or half. I had all the science, and she said, “the science is wonderful. It's a good bibliography kind of thing. It's good for you to know it, but you do not want to present 452 pages.” So this is 200 pages of hard packed knowledge.

Ginny: I do like the size of it.

Sharon: It's a good size. I fit it into my gardening apron, and that's why it fits in the pocket of my gardening apron. My copies that I have are filthy because I take them out in the garden.

Ginny: I bet. OK, so let's take a minute. I want to talk about your illustration. So, you know, in one page here, this is the slugfest page. I mean, there are so many illustrations just on this one layout here, you know? Do you write first and then do your illustrations after? 

Sharon: You know, I don't really live by those kinds of rules. For instance, I'm writing a book about a 19th century female scientist who was overlooked just as Beatrix Potter was overlooked as a scientist. And sometimes I just have to stop. Like yesterday, I stopped and did an illustration. And then I started writing again. So sometimes you don't want an idea to fly away because they're flightier than a hummingbird. And once they come and land on you, you need to get it down on paper. 

Ginny: I love that you don't want an idea to fly away. That's good. We're running out of time. There's so many good books. So that's “Sunflower Houses, A Book for Children and Their Grown-Ups.” I love that subtitle because how many books are there really for children and grown ups? There's some, you know, but there's not a lot. 

One of the things that really stuck out to me in this book, although, like I said, there's so many things was the floral clark garden. Something that I would never have really known about, except that we moved to this farmhouse. This is our third summer here and whoever was here knew about gardening and so they planted things throughout the season, you know, so they used the daffodils. And then there's tulips, and then there's poppies, and then there's the lenten rose. But anyway, stuff blooms, you know, throughout the summer, one thing and then the next thing. So I kind of knew a little bit about this succession planting. I don't know what you would even call it, but then you have it here during the day, in one day, you know, having this rhythm that are going to weave at different times. 

Sharon: I read a lot of old garden books from the 1800s and 1700s and I read about the flower clock. So I started doing my own research of what I could grow and when it would open, so it took me two years to do that. I mean, I was so excited when four o'clock made their debut at four o'clock. You know, it's just exciting. 

Ginny: I mean, you have every hour on the hour, starting at two a.m. You have three and four a.m., I mean, all the way through. And what I have been impressed with, Sharon, is that, you know, these work with the amount of amazing information that they have. Each one has different things. You know, there's not any crossover. So you find this, you know, awesome idea of what a way to teach kids how to tell time. 

Sharon:  I think there are a lot of back doors and avenues for getting through to kids without clumping on, it's like parents who say, “Let's go work in the garden.” Oh no, that's the worst thing you can do, right? Don't say, “Let's go work.” Say, “Let's go play. Let's go explore. Let's go see what's going on.” But don't say, “Let's go work.” 

Ginny: One of the cool ideas here is to make a rainbow. There's a photo here to make a pot of gold at the end and use rocks and different types of flowers. So this one is “Sunflower Houses, A Book for Children and Their Grownups. I'm going to read the front. 

“Remember making clover chains, hollyhock dolls and firefly lanterns? Or hosting a fairy party? Remember checking when the four o’clocks bloom? These simple pleasures, and hundreds more, are gathered here in a magical book of inspiration from the garden.”

So we love this one. Sunflower houses. I've got two more here of yours. I have Hollyhock Days, Garden Adventures for the Young at Heart. I have this friend, she is young and there is this wealth of knowledge about her. Her family has four kids, and when her daughter was five or five, she knew all the varieties. Her favorite flower is a hollyhock. This really makes me think of her.

Sharon: Well, that followed Sunflower Houses and sadly, it went out of print but Jeff and I stepped in and bought the last copies. My publisher no longer exists. And that happens a lot in the world of publishing. But we still have some. And what was important for me was just to tell some of the traditions with things and things like the Hollyhock hermit that Jeff and I discovered up in the mountains. The man and he wouldn't talk to people, but he grew thousands of Hollyhocks, every color. He had so many butterflies in his garden. So it's just more storytelling. You know, people say that there's one profession that's the most ancient, it's storytelling. I'm a storyteller and that's what I love to do. 

Ginny: So this is just such a beautiful book. I love this one, Hollyhock dats. And like I said, to have this little friend of ours says that's her favorite flower and it and what a cute title. And then there's this, Running Out of Night. 

Shareon: Oh, I loved writing that, you know, my grandma went in the very first sentence in there that mom, mom and her mama gave her last breath. The minute I took my first or something, as was my grandmother, Clarke told me that her mother died the moment she was born, and that's what started the whole story up. 

But it's really a book about friendship. It's really about friendship between two girls as different as day and night, and they became the best friends and they escaped slavery and bondage and cruelty together in it. I really got my basement learning on that because in my cousin Margaret's attic in Winchester, Virginia, I sat up in a log cabin and I read a trunk full of letters that were abolitionist letters and things from my Quaker, part of my family. And that's what germinated the whole process of Running Out of Night. And I loved writing. It's to just sit down and not have an outline and to not have any expectations and to just let the words pour from you like a sweet spring. It's just a wonderful thing. It really is. 

Ginny: It's a beautiful book, and the reviews on Amazon are amazing. Even on the front here, it says “lush, detailed total-immersion storytelling.” 

It draws you in from the first sentence. 

“Mama give her last breath just as I took my first.

Although Pa and my brothers never said they blame me for her death, I always felt it achin’ inside me like the rotten tooth our blacksmith pliered out of my mouth. Why else would a pa and his boys let a little girl come into the world and live for 12 years without giving her name?” 

I mean, that draws you in right from the beginning, it’s a middle grade novel. Everyone's always looking for middle grade novels, I think, or good for a family read aloud. I mean, this is just a beautiful book, Running Out of Night. 

Sharon: I’ve gotten lots of wonderful letters from families. It's just amazing. It's been amazing.

Ginny: I just want to thank you. I mean, these books, they're life changing. I mean, I don't really know how else to say that. For the rest of my life, you know, I'll have a garden and I don't think I would have if not for you, you know? And I think my kids will. And I think that other people will. In fact, you know, I send my stuff to you. Sometimes I'm always sending stuff to my parents and my in-laws, you know. They're so encouraging. I send them pictures of my flowers and my parents. So that's been a neat little bonding thing because they're avid gardeners. They always have a beautiful garden, and so they got to grow something new, but people are starting to send me their things. They're starting to send me pictures of their things, and I think that's stemming from you and giving me the courage and, you know, to go forth and try. You're going to get a lot of joy. So I just want to say thank you. I mean, these are labors of love - years years to write these books. That's a lot. And um, you know, I think they will live on forever.

Sharon: Thank you so much. Thanks for what you do. 

Ginny: Thank you for your time here today. Can we end with our favorite outdoor childhood memory of yours?

Sharon: I see my grandmother who would come and get me in the morning or I run through the Hollyhocks. She had a fabulous garden and she would carry a calendar with her and we'd pick berries or whatever we were using. And I keep a colander on a big nail outside my kitchen door in her honor. So that way, when the kids pick things, they can just wash them and get the worst of the dirt off and maybe eat some of the things outside. So I see my grandmother Lovejoy, in the sunlight. 

Ginny: Oh, it's beautiful. I think so many people associate their favorite and best childhood outdoor memories with their grandparents. So I think you're inspiring all of us to do the same. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. 

Sharon: It's my pleasure. Thank you. Keep up the good work. 

Learn more about Sharon Lovejoy here and here and here and here.