Rosie & Pogo Visit the Missouri Botanical Garden is a new children’s book published by the Missouri Botanical Garden Press. The book explores the Garden through the experience of Rosie, a girl who is blind, and her seeing-eye dog.
This is the first children’s book set at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was written by Therapeutic Horticulture Coordinator, Liz Byrde. She worked alongside her husband, Matt Byrde, a wildlife artist for the Missouri Department of Conservation who illustrated the story.
Rosie and Pogo’s journey
In the book, Rosie and Pogo visit several of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s conservatories and display gardens, including the Zimmerman Sensory Garden, Cimatron®, Margaret Grigg Nanjing Friendship Garden, and Japanese Garden. As Rosie and Pogo explore the Garden, the reader experiences the plants, fountains, and changing seasons from their perspective.
Like Rosie and Pogo, Liz and Matt visited these locations several times while creating the book to accurately capture the gardens and their atmospheres. On some occasions, they brought their children along to get another perspective.
“We have a seven-year-old an 11-year-old, and we brought them and walked through the Climatron® with their eyes closed and asked them to describe the things that they were experiencing,” Liz said.
The Climatron®, with its 24,000 square feet and over 2,800 plants, proved to be a fun challenge to translate onto the page.
“Every time we went, it was so overwhelming,” Matt said. “I actually ended up going and mapping out with photos how I wanted the actual page to look so it would be accurate to your experience of walking through the Climatron®.”
Through vivid language and colorful artwork, Liz and Matt paint a picture of the Missouri Botanical Garden steeped in multisensory wonder.
Inspiration from therapeutic horticulture
Liz says her work with the Garden’s Therapeutic Horticulture program inspired her to write a story that explored the Garden through smell, hearing, and touch. Therapeutic Horticulture teaches Garden visitors and community groups the role nature plays in our mental, physical, and social well-being.
“In Therapeutic Horticulture, we focus a lot on multi-sensory aspects of interacting with nature at the Garden,” Liz Byrde says. “Specifically, the Sensory Garden—we spend a lot of time there, and we harvest plants from there. So I’m always thinking about different ways to approach the Garden with the different senses.”
Conveying Senses On the Page
Liz narrates Rosie and Pogo’s journey through detailed, imaginative language that helps the reader and listeners visualize their experience at the Garden.
On each page, Matt creatively depicts the duo’s sensory experience of smell, hearing, and touch through his artwork.
“It was a fun and unique challenge to depict the different ways that you might experience certain stimuli in a visual way, since it’s a visual medium,” Matt Byrde said. “On almost every page, where she’s touching or hearing or feeling various things, you can see some sort of visual stimuli.”
Representation in Children’s Literature
Both Matt and Liz say that depicting Rosie and her service dog in an authentic and realistic way was something they prioritized. Before its release, Rosie & Pogo Visit the Missouri Botanical Garden was shared with members from the St. Louis Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired, one of the groups served by the Therapeutic Horticulture Program.
“It would be great for kids to think about experiencing nature in ways other than seeing it,” said Matt Byrde. “And to think about how other people, who might not have all their typical abilities, experience the world around them.”
The Missouri Botanical Garden Press is exploring options for printing the book in Braille to be more accessible to the people represented in Rosie & Pogo Visit the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Liz and Matt say they hope to explore more locations with Rosie and Pogo in subsequent books.
“We’d love to see Rosie and Pogo go to the Butterfly House or
Shaw Nature Reserve,” Liz said. “Maybe they can visit the Zoo or go to the Arch. That would be really, for sure, fun to see it expand out in
that way.”
Rosie & Pogo Visit the Missouri Botanical Garden
Written by Liz Byrde | Illustrated by Matt Byrde
Rosie & Pogo Visit the Missouri Botanical Garden is currently available for purchase through the Garden Gate Shop at the Missouri Botanical Garden and online through Missouri Botanical Garden Press.
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