The Garden Detectives

About this book

The Garden Detectives is an interactive nature activity book for young readers, disguised, delightfully, as a series of mysteries. Every chapter is a case. In the Case of the Nibbled Lettuce the children learn to read the clues a hungry visitor leaves behind, and to catch a suspect by watching at the right time of day. In the Case of the Fainting Sunflower they discover what a wilting plant is really telling them and watch it come back to life. There are mystery tracks to identify by making a smoothed patch of mud, a flower that gets all the bee visitors while its neighbour gets none, a seed that stubbornly will not sprout until the detectives work out what it is waiting for, a worm that seems not to know which way is up, a puddle that vanishes into thin air, a spotty leaf with three possible culprits, a garden that comes alive after dark, and a compost heap that has mysteriously grown warm from the inside.