SUNFLOWER SAL

Sal desperately wants to make a quilt, but her big hands just don't seem to have the knack of doing such small, fussy work. What she is good at is raising sunflowers, hundreds and thousands of giant yellow blooms by the back door of the farmhouse, behind the garden, on either side of the lane, and all along the dusty roads. A late-summer climb to the top of Bare Hill reveals that the neat squares of fields and pasture below have been ``stitched together with sunflowers''—Sal has made her quilt. It's a lovely story from Anderson (Going Through the Gate, p. 1106) about finding one's true gifts, with sun-washed oil paintings in a palette of (what else?) gold, brown, and green. Put this next to Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius (1982) and the Johnny Appleseed tales, about other characters whose horticultural labors of love transformed landscapes. (Picture book. 6-10)