Every towering tree begins as something small—a seed, a nut, a promise of life waiting to unfold. I was thinking about this as I admired my neighbor’s sweetgum tree, gathering up some of the prickly “gumballs” on the ground to share with local summer learning programs that are implementing Tree Trekkers with their students. I just wished that kids could see this magnificent tree too and make the connection to how trees get their start, how they change over time, and how something so small can grow into something truly amazing.
But that’s why we have books! In this guest blog post, author Mary Auld invites us into the heart of the rainforest to discover how something as small as a Brazil nut can tell a much bigger story. In Little Brown Nut, Mary traces the extraordinary life cycle of the Brazil nut tree—from a seed on the forest floor to towering rainforest giant—and in doing so, explores the deep connections between nature, wildlife, and humanity. Here, she reflects on how writing in the voice of the nut brought the tree’s story to life, why interdependence in nature matters, and how through the lens of one tree, we can better understand the intricate, beautiful systems that support all life on Earth—including our own.
Mary is an award-winning writer of more than 20 children’s informational books, most notably How To Build an Orchestra with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Start Small, Think Big Books series. Mary Auld is a pen name for Rachel Cooke, former Editorial Director at Hachette UK and an honorary fellow of the English Association in recognition of her work in children’s nonfiction. She finds art in science, history in music, and loves starting something small and following it through to something really big. We’re so happy to have her here at Book Life! — Rachael Walker, Reading Rockets’ Book Life
Our World in a Tree by Mary Auld
Starting small
All trees start with something small—a seed, often in the form of a nut—then many grow into something really big. So Little Brown Nut tells how a small nut grows to become a Brazil nut tree, one of the giants of the rainforest, and then makes its own nuts. It is the story of a tree’s life cycle.
Thinking big
This life cycle gave the book its narrative structure. And I found that telling this story in the first person, as though I was a Brazil nut who became a tree, was a great way to pull the reader in. But I wanted to do more than this. As I swiftly discovered as I researched the book, exploring a Brazil nut tree’s life cycle linked to many other things that make you think “big”—not just about trees but also about our world. The challenge when writing the book was how bring all these ideas in. The pleasure was being able to celebrate the importance of trees in our lives.
A tree for life
Many different animals depend on a Brazil nut tree. Dawn Cooper, the book’s illustrator, has brilliantly depicted them and it is great fun discovering them, often hidden in the pages, as you read through the book. All trees provide a habitat, but the Brazil nut tree relies equally on some of these animals for its existence as well: so only one species of bee can pollinate its flowers and it needs the agouti, a type of rodent, to spread and bury its nuts so that new trees grow. Interdependence like this in nature is so important for us to understand as it shows how we, as humans, rely on nature too and, consequently, need to protect it.
A tree for us
Towards its end, Little Brown’s Nut explores this human connection much more concretely—because, of course, Brazil nuts are a delicious food for us, too. Amazingly, they are hard to cultivate so all those Brazil nuts we eat come from the wild rainforest and are collected by people foraging through the dense forest floor. These people rely on Brazil nut trees for their livelihood, we benefit from the Brazil nut tree by eating its nutritious fruit and all of us would suffer if the Brazil nut tree was no longer flourishing in its rainforest habitat.
A tree in a rainforest
And many, many books have been written about the importance of rainforests… The focus of this book on one type of tree allowed a new perspective on this subject, considering how one species impacts on many others and is part of a bigger whole. With this approach, I was able, for example, not only to explore photosynthesis for an individual plant but also later point readers towards the importance of oxygen and water in terms of global climates. I used the “THINK BIG” panel on the book’s last, fold-out spread to do this. I love how this big, spectacular finale to the book gives a physical representation of the whole concept of the series this title is part of—Start Small, Think Big.
A tree for our world
From a little brown nut grows a tree and from a tree you can explore our whole world. What I hope people will take away from reading Little, Brown Nut is not just that a tree’s life cycle is amazing, but so too is our natural world—we should not only treasure it, but also have a responsibility to respect and conserve it.
Resources
- Mary Auld on Instagram
- Start with a Book: Tree Trekkers
- Reading Adventure Pack: Environment
- Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions
- ReadWriteThink: Teaching Science Through Picture Books: A Rainforest Lesson
