FRUIT LANE

Fruit Lane is a very visual book. Great attention has been placed on detail so as to offer children, parents and teachers many different avenues of exploration. It can be used on a basic level to talk about colours and numbers. Fruit, jobs, flowers, animals, insects and birds are further topics to invite discussion. The garden of Number 8 Fruit Lane is just packed with things to look at and then there are the houses ....!

Each text page finishes with a question to stimulate conversation but all going well, you'll have already found plenty to talk about.

FRUIT LANE FUN FACTS

Mrs Strawberry has a flower clock in her garden. The original idea for a flower clock came from Carl Linnaeus (1707 -1778), a Swedish botanist who observed that flowers open and close at certain times. In the 19th century gardeners liked to plant 'flower clocks'. Flowerbeds were laid out in a circle to form the clock face. This was split into 12 segments. Each one contained flowers which opened or closed in that one-hour period.

Rose and Ruby Strawberry's favourite flower is the sunflower. It gets its name from the Greek words, 'helios', meaning sun and 'anthos' meaning flower (helianthus). Sunflowers can be yellow, orange, red or brown. Once a sunflower opens, it usually faces east. Sunflowers can be planted between May and early July. They need a lot of sunlight and have to be staked and well watered. They reach their full height in 80-90 days. You can tell a sunflower is ready to harvest when the back part of the head turns brown.

Mrs Apple lives in Island House. She is fascinated by Japanese gardens and asked Mrs Strawberry to design one for her. It took a lot of hard work and rather a lot of money but Mrs Apple got what she wanted. She has a peaceful garden with Japanese plants, cloud trees, a waterfall and koi carp in the pond which surrounds her house. Her rowing boat is painted like the ones she saw on holiday in Madeira. It's just a pity Neville Orange, her neighbour's son, isn't peaceful!

Mrs Banana loves birds and travelling. In her garden, she sees lots of different kinds of birds: chaffinches, coal tits, wagtails, bullfinches, crows, sparrows, robins, blue tits, goldfinches, great tits, greenfinches, tree creepers, blackbirds and great spotted woodpeckers; she hears the barn owls hooting and sometimes buzzards swoop down and sit majestically on her gate, looking for lunch.

If you look carefully at Mrs Banana's garden, you'll see her wind chime in the trees. It's a quetzal bird. This bird is the national bird of Guatemala and gives the currency of that country its name. Quetzals live in the mountainous, tropical forests of Central America. Mrs Banana likes to visit her relatives all over the world but she is especially fond of her family in Guatemala.

Do you know where bananas come from? Bananas grow in many different, hot places in the world. Here are some of them: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Belize, the Dominican Republic, the Canary Islands, the Windward Islands, Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, the Philippines, Guadeloupe and Somalia.

Did you know that bananas don't really grow on trees? They are actually giant herbs!

Why does Dr Pear have letters of the alphabet on her coat? These are vitamins: A, B, C, D and E. Dr Pear is always telling people how important vitamins are. Fruit and vegetables are packed with vitamins A, B, C and E. Vitamin D can be found in fish, for example tuna, sardines, mackerel and salmon plus in eggs. However, the most important source of Vitamin D is sunlight. Vitamins are important for your eyes, bones, teeth, skin, hair, heart, brain, red blood cells and body growth. Without the proper vitamins you can have poor eyesight, bad memory, weak bones and teeth, dull hair, immune system problems, heart problems, skin problems.... and a lot more besides!!

So what is growing in Mr Grapefruit's front garden? Well, he has potatoes in the tyres, tomatoes in the greenhouse, climbing beans by the fence and in one of the tubs, herbs like basil and parsley and dill in the second tub as well as shiitake mushrooms growing on the logs beside his house. He also gets a plentiful supply of brown eggs wih bright orange yolks from his hens and for a few weeks between May and July his geese lay big white eggs for which he needs a special egg cup.

Mr Grape is a mountaineer. He has climbed Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. It was named after Sir George Everest, the British surveyor-general of India, in 1865 and forms part of the Himalaya range which borders Nepal and Tibet. Mount Everest is 8850 metres high.

Mr Grape has named his sons after mountains. McKinley is named after Mount McKinley, also known as Denali, in Alaska. At 6194 metres, it is the highest mountain in North America. Mount McKinley gets its name from William McKinley, 25th President of the United States. Goodwin Austen Grape gets his name from the mountain which is better known as K2. Mount Goodwin Austen, part of the Karakorum mountain range on the border of Pakistan and China, is 8611 metres high and is the second highest in the world. It was named after Goodwin Austen, a British surveyor, in 1887.