Spring has officially sprung and the weather is finally starting to reflect that! Celebrate Spring by getting out in your garden. You’ll find tips, tricks, inspiration and more from these great titles available from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library:

Outdoor Gardening

Get advice from one of America’s most creative gardeners in 101 Gardening Hacks: Eco-Friendly Solutions to Improve Any Garden by Shawna Coronado.
Ever heard of no-dig gardening? You’ll be hooked after you read Organic Gardening the Natural No-Dig Way by Charles Dowding.
Get landscape design inspiration from Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces by Jan Johnsen.
You’ll be turning your dinner scraps into new plants after you read No-Waste Kitchen Gardening: Regrow Your Leftover Greens, Stalks, Seeds, and More by Katie Elzer-Peters.
Tour the stunning gardens of a renowned British institution in Oxford College Gardens by Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson.

Indoor Gardening

Indoor gardening is wonderful because we can do it year-round! Learn more from these titles:

Your indoor plants will be thriving after you read How to Raise a Plant and Make It Love You Back by Morgan Doane.
Everything you need to know to make your orchid happy is in Happy Orchid by Sara Rittershausen!
Learn how a spray bottle and a little sunlight can bring your indoor space to life in Living with Air Plants: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing and Displaying Tillandsia by Yoshiharu Kashima.

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Adult Fiction

Novels more your thing? We’ve got great fiction that involves gardening:

A young widow’s grief is eased as she discovers a love of vegetable gardening in The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman.
Science teacher and rose breeder Gal Garner learns lessons in love when she cares for her estranged teenage niece in The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns by Margaret Dilloway.
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen is the first novel in a series about the Waverly family, who tend their magical garden in Bascom, North Carolina.
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is an intergenerational family saga that will take you from Australia to England’s Cornish coast.

For Young Readers

Share the joy of gardening and flowers with your kids with these titles:

Kids learn to grow the vegetables they will use to make delicious dishes in Plant, Cook, Eat: A Children’s Cookbook by Joe Archer.
Bloom Boom! by April Pulley Sayre is a celebration of springtime!
There is so much activity, from burrowing animals to sprouting leaves, in Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner.
Learn how planting flowers can transform a gray city in The Curious Garden by Peter Brown.
Lola’s parents show her how to tend her seeds in Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn.
Enjoy a mother and child planting their flower garden in Lois Ehlert’s classic Planting a Rainbow.
In Caldecott Honor-winning classic The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, Lydia Grace gains the love of gardening in spite of having to move to the city.

HistoryMakers

Check out The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, an oral history collection highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. It is unique among collections of African American heritage because of its large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present.

Adult Nonfiction

In A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools, Rachel Devlin tells the story of young black women who led the movement to integrate schools.
Read the true story of Josiah Henson, immortalized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War by Jared Brock.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi, winner of 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, exposes the origins of racist ideas and their role in rationalizing policies that promote racial inequality.

Adult Fiction

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the story of a young slave woman’s bid to escape the Antebellum South, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Jesmyn Ward won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, an exploration of history and racism through the lens of a multiracial family in the rural South.
Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson, was a 2016 National Book Award finalist; it is a picture of life for a young African American woman growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s.
Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, winner of the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the story of a Cameroonian immigrant’s pursuit of the American dream in Harlem in 2007.

Young Adult Fiction and Nonfiction

Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down, longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, takes place during an elevator ride of a 15-year-old boy determined to avenge his brother’s shooting death.
Monster, Walter Dean Myer’s classic, tackles issues of race, class, gender and the judicial system with a 16-year-old black teen on trial for murder.
Dreamland Burning, by Jennifer Latham, tells intersecting stories of present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
Tony Medina’s I Am Alfonso Jones is a tale of police brutality and Black Lives Matter told in graphic novel format.
Presented in graphic novel format, the March Trilogy is Congressman John Lewis’ narrative of his experiences in the civil rights movement.

Pre-Teen Fiction and Nonfiction

Learn about Depression-era life in the South in Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper.
Mildred D. Taylor’s classic Logan Family series is set in post-Civil War Georgia and features classics The Land and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Linda Williams Jackson’s Midnight Without a Moon gives readers a glimpse of race relations in rural Mississippi in the 1950s.
In Freedom on the Menu: the Greensboro Sit-Ins, author Carole Boston Weatherford envisions the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins through the eyes of a young African American observer.

Young readers

March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine by Melba Beals
Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Stephen Alcorn
What Color Is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld

Picture Books

In the Resources section of our website you’ll find Books & Authors, where you can browse the complete list of winners of the Coretta Scott King Award, which recognizes African American authors and illustrators who express the African American experience in works for young people.