Little Bee’s Year of Blooms

By Sarah Jane Lightfoot

Reviewed by Mia Macrossan

This is the board book format of the  popular Down the Road, Little Bee, aimed at smaller and younger nature lovers. Sarah aims to ‘celebrate the everyday magic of our neighbourhoods, encouraging readers to slow down, look closer, and discover beauty in the familiar’, and here she has created a book that will encourage every reader to engage more closely with the animals and plants in their own garden and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Little Bee’s Year of Blooms has twelve creatively cut pages each celebrating a tiny animal and a flower that blooms in that month. Starting with January, each page becomes slightly bigger each time, building up to a magnificent double page of jacaranda flowers with little bee helping moth find the pollen therein for December. Along the way we meet spider amongst the sunflowers, stick insect in the roses, ladybird in the crepe myrtle, beetle in the banksias, an ant in the proteas, snail in the wattle, a fly in the magnolia, caterpillar in the wisteria, butterfly in the bottlebrush, and a mosquito in the waratah blooms.

As you can see these are animals and plants common in most Australian gardens. So this attractive book is a delightful way to acquaint young children with the wealth of flora and fauna around us as well as teaching them about what happens at different times in the year. This is possibly a difficult concept for the very young but it does lay the groundwork for future conversations.

An attractive and informative book that many children will enjoy.

Affirm Press 2025

Sarah Jane Lightfoot