MRS. NOAH'S GARDEN

As Mr. Noah converts the Ark into a home after making landfall, Mrs. Noah finds a place to create a new garden.

Gazing at a blue, stony landscape, Mrs. Noah misses her home’s garden. She looks around the land and finds a place where some trees had hung on through the flood. Her children, whose skin tones vary between Mrs. Noah’s dark brown skin and Mr. Noah’s pale skin, help her to clear space and build stone walls and terraces. Some mythical creatures help too. Mrs. Noah plants seeds from her pockets and “trees, shrubs, bushes and bulbs” that were carried on the Ark. She works on the garden all day long and does homemaking chores at night (“Curtains. At last,” Mr. Noah thinks). As she continues shaping the garden and “the earth blossom[s] under her touch,” the rains fall gently, and the pictures show her belly growing. On Midsummer’s Eve, Mrs. Noah sleeps in the garden, and the next morning, the children find a world in blossom, loud with bird song and buzzing bees. The text is thick with lush, lovely description and symbolic imagery of life and regeneration. With densely colored, busy collage illustrations, this distinctive story evokes a combination of the fantastical, the religious (both Biblical and pagan), the ancient, the modern, and the timeless. A few surprising details (like the use of a sewing machine) call unnecessary attention to themselves, but these quirks are easily forgiven.

An imagination well worth walking through.