Thank you to the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee for honoring Fungi Grow. I have found the Horn Book to be a guiding voice and influence both in my time illustrating and writing picture books and as an avid reader of the genre. I have long admired Maria Gianferrari’s writing and her love of the natural world. It’s an interest we both share, and I was delighted when offered the opportunity to illustrate Fungi Grow. I was inspired by her playful, illuminating text; the breadth of species; and all the beneficial, destructive, and adaptable qualities contained therein. An organism that begins as a tiny speck yet could contain massive possibilities: a lowly mold leading to the creation of antibiotics, thin tendrils of mycelium connecting expansive networks of trees, sharing resources and nurturing entire ecosystems.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2024 BGHB Nonfiction and Poetry winners.]

Many of the species I chose to paint are common species that I regularly see around where I live in northeastern Illinois and that any child could find in a local park, preserve, or backyard in North America: turkey tail, dryad’s saddle, morels, puffballs. As we continue to live through a steady decline in biodiversity worldwide, my approach in illustrating a book of this nature is to create images that help readers to understand, celebrate, and connect to the diversity of organisms with which we share the earth, even the most common and unassuming.

While working on the paintings for Fungi Grow, I thought often of my grandfather who immigrated to the United States in 1917 from a tiny village in Italy. He was a skilled gardener and loved to forage, often bringing home chicken-of-the-woods — a large, edible, bright orange mushroom that grows at the base of oaks. My grandmother would cook it. My mother recalled its spongy texture and neutral chicken-y flavor. Last fall my family and I found chicken-of-the-woods erupting on a large dead oak while hiking in Michigan. We brought some home and cooked them in butter, savoring that spongy texture and chicken-y flavor. We talked about our hike and about my grandfather. I was grateful to the mushroom for the meal, connecting us like mycelium tendrils to place, nature, and to family, including those who are no longer with us.

My heartfelt thanks to Maria along with Andrea Welch and Lauren Rille of Beach Lane Books at Simon & Schuster for granting creative space, guidance, and trust. I hope the joy I experienced in painting these illustrations and my love of biodiversity is clear.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB24.