My Pollinator Garden: How I Plant for Bees, Butterflies, Beetles, and More (Hardcover)

Do you want to help the earth? You can start in your own backyard! Learn about important bees, birds, butterflies, and bats–and the special plants that keep them alive.  With stunning illustrations by a NY Times bestselling illustrator.

Bees need pollen and nectar from flowers. But not all flowers feed all bees. Some bees need long, narrow flowers. Some bees need short flowers. Some tiny  bees can’t fly far and need flowers that are nearby. Some bees can take pollen from only one particular kind of flower. Those bees are in trouble if that flower isn’t available to them. Flies, wasps, beetles, bats, birds, and butterflies need flowers too. 

This book is about amazing animals and plants that are native to North America, how they need each other to survive, and how you can help them. 

Back matter has information about how you can grow your own pollinator garden, as well as a glossary, bibliography, and index. 

An excellent choice for parents and educators looking for books that provide content knowledge (background knowledge) about the natural world to support reading comprehension.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Reviews

An easygoing, inviting presentation of an increasingly popular and essential topic in gardening. . . . Robust back matter elaborates on the wider concepts presented here and offers advice on caring for a pollinator garden. Important, fact-filled information in an appealingly pretty package.
—Booklist

Coupled with Cosgrove’s brushy-textured illustrations, Zwetchkenbaum’s straightforward prose will help children understand how the wild bergamot and the spicebush swallowtail are well suited to each other. . . .Inspiration for both keen-eyed nature lovers and gardening families.
—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

JORDAN ZWETCHKENBAUM (ZWECH-ken-boum) graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering and is currently attending a certificate program in sustainable gardening with native plants at Go Native U at Westchester Community College. With a lifelong interest in wildlife conservation and many friends in the juvenile publishing community, Jordan was the inspiration for the pumpkin plant in Jean Marzollo’s I’m a Seed. She lives with her partner in Corning, NY, where she welcomes native bees, butterflies, and birds to her own pollinator garden.

KATE COSGROVE (CAHZ-grohv) is the illustrator of the New York Times bestselling picture book A Day with No Words by Tiffany Hammond. Kate has received many awards and honors for her artwork, including a Dolly Gray Literature Award, a Highlights Foundation Scholarship, and selection for the 41st and 43rd Original Art Annual Exhibitions in New York City. Kate illustrated And the Bullfrogs Sing, a Bank Street Best Book of the Year and a Maryland Blue Crab Young Reader Award Honors book, The Dirt Book: Poems about Animals that Live Beneath Our Feet, which was a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year and was selected for the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List, and A Tree Is a Community, all by David. L. Harrison. With pencil-smudge fingers, Kate is usually hiding, along with a smelly dog named Stanley, in her probably-haunted art studio.