I have another Jo MacDonald book that’s going to come out next year, it’s called Jo MacDonald Had a Garden and I’m very excited about this book. When I was a kid, my dad was concerned about environmental issues and replanted gardens that would sustain wildlife as well as having gardens that would produce food for humans. So with this particular book, it’s showing kids or Jo is actually creating a garden that’s going to produce food for people — tomatoes and squash and things like that — but also create it in a way that’s going to sustain wildlife.
So she adds a big flat rock for butterflies to rest on, she adds some coneflowers because those are native plants and attractive to the bumblebees and the butterflies. And she plants a sunflower because there’s a cardinal who winters there and he eats the seeds from the sunflower. So just small additions to our gardens and to our backyards can do a lot towards sustaining the wildlife that’s a part of our environment.
It’s funny these days, we talked a little bit earlier about the No Child Left Inside movement and how it’s so important these days to connect children with the natural world and how kids are very curious naturally about the outdoor world around them. So that they are just as intrigued by the butterfly in the backyard and the chickadee and the cardinal that they see every day as they are about the nature that they see on the nature shows.
Or the lion that they might see on an African safari. So in other words, I think helping kids to connect and appreciate the natural world that’s part of their environment makes them want to protect that or become good stewards of the natural world that’s around them.
My dad was the model for the Old McDonald that in the two books Jo MacDonald Saw a Pond and Jo MacDonald Had a Garden, he is kind of in the background but he’s showing her how to do things. And my dad as I said I grew up in the country, we had a pond like Jo MacDonald’s, we had a garden like Jo MacDonald’s, and I’ve seen my child and my dad’s grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, just become more aware of the natural world through my dad in a very loving, playful way.
You know there seems to be… sometimes I think there’s in a way a lack of older adults in contemporary children’s books. I don’t know where they are to tell you the truth, they seem to tucked away in retirement communities but they don’t seem to be entering contemporary children’s literature. They’re not part of the neighborhoods or they’re not part of the, I don’t know, I don’t see them as much as maybe I used to.
And so I liked working with the idea of an older man, Old McDonald as part of the Jo MacDonald story.
