Jackson was a character that just popped into my head. I had so much liking for him. And how he came about my husband and I were living in an apartment in Washington D.C. growing up in the country and with gardens, I missed that. So we got a plot in the community garden, and you know around me I saw families tending their gardens and kids coming in and out.
And it gave me the idea to set a novel, early novel sort of chapter book, in a community garden and sort of follow that through as the setting for three books. And Jackson is a kid, a lot like one of my brothers — I have to say a little bit like me — who liked the idea of a garden but didn’t like the weeding part of it. He’d much rather be doing something else like playing basketball.
So whenever I go into the schools and talk about that book with the kids I always ask them the question would you rather have a garden as a birthday present or would you rather have a new basketball? Because he’s given the first but not the second and it’s usually equal and it’s not necessarily boys wanting the basketball. But half the class usually wants the garden, the other class wants the basketball.
So it’s Jackson’s problem to sort of figure out now that he’s got this garden how he’s going raise money for the basketball, state of the art basketball, that he really does want. And it’s interesting too with Jackson and that community garden setting, there’s a lot of concern these days about the No Child Left Inside movement and the need to better connect our children with the natural world at the same time we’re losing a lot of our green spaces to development.
And we especially see that in the city. So in all three of the books these are urban kids very involved with the natural world and concerned about the environment in a kid like way. And in the second book Jackson Jones and Mission Greentop the community garden is in danger because there is a development project the developers want to buy the garden, they want to raise it and they want to put up yet another city building. And this is happening all across the country.
And interestingly enough kids are at the vanguard of protest. And so in that second book in the Jackson Jones series, Jackson and his friends are the ones that galvanize the community and try to save the garden.