My kids adore being outside and exploring. They love gardening, foraging and observing nature. They also love books! It made sense to pull together a list of gardening books for kids and, books about nature for kids to populate our library.
Any one of these children’s books about gardening and nature would be perfect for gifting or to inspire your own kids to get outside and explore. Do you spot any favourites? Are there others we should add?
Head to Flower Power Milperra for our favourite place to shop for plants AND feast on yummy delights and Frankie’s Food Factory.
Children’s Books About Gardening and Nature
Table of Contents
- Let’s Eat Weeds! A Kids’ Guide to Foraging
- Botanicum
- Compost Stew
- Let’s Get Gardening: Australian Eco-gardening Projects for Children
- Can You Hear the Trees Talking?
- What’s Inside A Flower?
- Gardening Lab for Kids
- A Year in Fleurville : Recipes from balconies, rooftops, and gardens
- Fauna Australia’s Most Curious Creatures
- Wild Things
- Aussie Stem Stars: Georgia Ward-Fear
- Nature Trail
- Keeping a Nature Journal
- Nature All Around : Trees
- Nature Anatomy
- Diary of a Young Naturalist
- Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt
- Wild Australia Colouring Book
- Things That Grow
- Let Your Kids Go Wild Outside
Look Inside these Gardening and Nature Books for Kids
Let’s Eat Weeds! A Kids’ Guide to Foraging
This Australian book shows kids just how great edible weeds can taste. Find out how to identify them, where and when to find them, and how to cook them.
More about this book: Booktopia
Botanicum
From perennials to bulbs to tropical exotica, Botanicum is a wonderful feast of botanical knowledge complete with superb cross-sections of how plants work.
More about this book: Booktopia
Compost Stew
Do you know how to start a compost pile? Do you know what is safe to include? This book is a year-round reference providing all the answers for kids and families looking for simple, child-friendly ways to help the planet.
More about this book: Booktopia
Let’s Get Gardening: Australian Eco-gardening Projects for Children
Australian Eco-gardening Projects for Children. This book includes three simple chapters – kitchen gardening, wildlife gardening and recycled gardening – each with easy sustainability projects to inspire everyone’s inner eco-kid.
More about this book: Booktopia
Can You Hear the Trees Talking?
Peter Wohlleben is well known for his advocacy for forests and our relationships with trees. Can You Hear the Trees Talking? is a nature book for kids that is bursting with exciting quizzes, photographs, and hands-on activities to help even the most reluctant learners disover more about trees and their importance in our lives.
More about this book: Booktopia
What’s Inside A Flower?
Budding backyard scientists can start exploring their world, learning how flowers grow and providing opportunities for readers to find answers to their questions.
More about this book: Booktopia
Gardening Lab for Kids
This fun and creative book features 52 plant-related activities set into weekly lessons, beginning with learning to read maps to find your heat zone, moving through seeds, soil, composting, and then creating garden art and appreciating your natural surroundings.
More about this book: Booktopia
A Year in Fleurville : Recipes from balconies, rooftops, and gardens
A Year in Fleurville is a cookbook, a mini-guide to gardening, and a picture book rolled into one, celebrating the joys of coming together and sharing the rich rewards of our gardens and kitchens.
More about this book: Booktopia
Fauna Australia’s Most Curious Creatures
In Fauna – Australia’s Most Curious Creatures, readers are constantly introduced to facts that delight, amaze and induce sheer wonder at the clever design and adaptability of our much-loved native fauna.
The information on each individual species is presented in small ‘bites’ to hold the interest of younger readers, while the information taken in total gives a comprehensive summary of each species, including breeding and feeding habits, physical characteristics, habitat and other unique and quirky features.
More about this book: Booktopia
Wild Things
This fantastical guidebook will help you track dragons, create fairy fashions, brew magic potions, build snow unicorns, discover trolls and go on night hunts to capture moon magic. Search forests, meadows, fields, ponds, rivers and the seaside, as well as everyday places like school playgrounds, local parks or among the pots on the patio.
More about this book: Booktopia
Aussie Stem Stars: Georgia Ward-Fear
Georgia Ward-Fear is most famous for her research into shifting ecological paradigms and animal behaviour. She is also an adventurer, travelling extensively in her sea kayak. Georgia Ward-Fear’s conservation journey has seen her travel the world, empower young girls to become environmental leaders, and carry out trailblazing work to save native animals from the threat of cane toads.
More about this book: Booktopia
Nature Trail
This joyful celebration of nature reminds us all to take a closer look at the world around us, and enjoy the wonder of nature wherever we find it. Packed with animals and minibeasts galore, this imaginative rhyming text is perfect for reading aloud.
More about this book: Booktopia
Keeping a Nature Journal
With an emphasis on learning to see and observe, Leslie shows how drawing nature doesn’t require special skills, artistic ability, or even nature knowledge, and it is a tool everyone can use to record observations and experience the benefits of a stronger connection to the natural world.
More about this book: Booktopia
Nature All Around : Trees
This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated introduction to trees and the important role they play is part of the essential Nature All Around series. The book first explores the parts of trees, their life cycles, the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees, leaf types and the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. Then it takes readers through a year in the life cycle of trees, describing what happens during each of the four seasons.
More about this book: Booktopia
Nature Anatomy
Nature Anatomy is for anyone who appreciates and wants to explore the curiosities and beauty of the natural world in a new way. With whimsically hip illustrations by acclaimed illustrator Julia Rothman, every page is an extraordinary (and frame-worthy!) look at all kinds of subjects, including mineral formation, the inside of a volcano, what makes sunsets, monarch butterfly migration, the ecosystem of a rotting log, the parts of a bird, the anatomy of a jellyfish, and much much more.
More about this book: Booktopia
Diary of a Young Naturalist
Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of 15-year-old Dara McAnulty’s world. From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are raw in their telling.
More about this book: Booktopia
Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt
Up in the garden, the world is full of green leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt, there is a busy world of earthworms digging, snakes hunting, skunks burrowing, and all the other animals that make a garden their home. In this exuberant and lyrical book, discover the wonders that lie hidden between stalks, under the shade of leaves…and down in the dirt.
More about this book: Booktopia
Wild Australia Colouring Book
Featuring hand-drawn illustrations, this book contains 14 beautiful spreads to colour in. Suitable for kids and adults alike, each spread features 12 animals amongst native scenery waiting to be filled in, with a guide at the back for those who like to get the colours right! Locations include: Bondi Beach Simpson Desert Daintree Rainforest Antarctica Cradle Mountain Great Barrier Reef Uluru Kakadu Sydney Harbour Mt Kosciuszko
More about this book: Booktopia
Things That Grow
The world around us is always growing and changing – no two days are ever the same! Use this beautifully illustrated book to slow the passage of time and discover how a seed transforms into a mighty tree, understand how mountains and islands are created and learn what a puggle becomes when it grows up.
More about this book: Booktopia
Let Your Kids Go Wild Outside
In an era when the iPad is often more appealing than the park, it can be difficult to encourage kids to get off the couch and go outside. In this inspirational book, with ideas for children of all ages, foraging expert Fiona Bird shows the value of playing outside and discovering nature for children and families alike.
More about this book: Booktopia
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