“Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks”

Children’s literature is inherently a dialogue between child and adult, or more broadly, those at different stages of the life course. Bringing age studies and studies of children’s literature together, this article considers how children’s literature depicts and explores age stages and intergenerationality, focusing on the role of the garden in this. In children’s literature, the garden often functions as a meeting place for the child and the older adult, a space that is associated with, and activates assumptions about, both childhood and older age. To explore this potential, we examine three contemporary picturebooks in English that depict an intergenerational relationship between a child(ren) and a grandparent, and include a garden central to the narrative: Roxane Marie Galliez and Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s Time for Bed, Miyuki (2017), Allan Ahlberg and Gillian Tyler’s The Snail House (2000) and Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden (2016). As our analysis demonstrates, they represent the garden as a liminal space, where the associations with childhood and older age are mobilised in ways that both reinforce and challenge age norms and stereotypes as well as the dichotomous view of age stages.