What is a Book Garden?
Like vegetable and flower gardens, book gardens are places where life sprouts and blooms. Book gardens offer literacy opportunity and personal growth. They’re places like libraries, book stores, and homes.
Just like vegetable and flower varieties, the appeal of each book in a book garden is unique to the tastes of individual readers. And like vegetables and flowers, a harvest of books can be shared with others in a community.
Unlike vegetables or flowers that decay, books’ sharing potential never end; books can be recommended, loaned, or given to subsequent readers time and time again. It is that continual sharing of books and the casual conversations engendered by books that make for cohesive families and connected communities.
A book garden’s role
Book gardens play the important role of providing relatively easy access to appealing books. Book gardens invite people to explore fulfilling reading experiences and to enhance literacy growth and expand understanding. Such gardens offer books and magazines, bursting with the potential for adding another chapter of learning to a population.
Where book gardens grow
Public and school libraries can be book gardens if people feel welcome to visit them and if they understand how to use them. Book stores can be book gardens for eager readers with the means to purchase books. Private homes filled with books are book gardens. All of these book gardens can create and activate a flow of books into children’s hands.
The flow gets interrupted, however, when books aren’t shared. Book shelves of unshared books are merely galleries of book covers, their bound treasures lying silent. Their potential unrealized.
Share the bounty
Courtesy of Kelly Ziesenis Carter on Unsplash
It’s quite likely that there are enough books in the world for every child and adult to experience a lifelong flow of books into their lives. And we know that the steady consumption of individually selected books teach children the power, value, and benefits of reading which leads to lifelong learning. It’s the key to growing readers.
Through sharing the bounty of book gardens, communities strengthen their social connections. As more books are planted in book gardens, cohesive and expanding communities of learning and opportunity are cultivated and continue to grow. New book gardens sprout through the generous and open-handed offering of good reads between families, friends, and neighbors.