Look! Flowers!

Calmenson offers a rhyming overview of 18 types of flowers, delineating the individual characteristics of common varieties (roses, sunflowers, daisies) and rarer examples (bleeding hearts, corpse flowers) that readers may be encountering for the first time. While the author packs a fair amount of information into the rhymes, they can feel somewhat convoluted (“How did the elephant’s head/ get its odd name?/ If you look from the side,/ you’ll see how that name came”), but Pinillos’s intricately detailed illustrations lovingly highlight the flowers’ botanical properties while introducing a secondary cast of ants, beetles, and other insects to catch readers’ eyes. Available simultaneously: Look! Birds! Ages 3–6. (Mar.)