This Book Totally Makes Stuff Grow

This ‘activity’ picture book appears to be a by-product of the ‘hugely successful’ Maggie Rose club which, to quote the publishers ‘now has over 500 families on their member books’. Such careless grammar makes me suspect the soundness of the work, which attempts to interest young folks in the practice and ecology of horticulture. Maggie, Rose and Oscar learn that you can make compost in three months – and this without activator and no inkling of what it’s like when it’s ready. That takes some believing.

The author – rightly too modest to be named either on title page or in bibliographical details – is very, and rightly, reverent of soil but then proceeds to call it ‘dirt’; this Americanism is not only confusing, it sounds disrespectful.

And those creatures which, 40 years ago, we all learned to call ‘minibeasts’, are here called ‘bugs’. This is not helpful when the United Kingdom is experiencing a huge increase in its bedbug population…