The Land of Vegetation (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780578929606)

Once upon a time, in the Land of Vegetation, there lived a King and a Queen and a Prince and Princess in a beautiful castle. And on the edge of the capital city, there lived a wise woman in a small cottage with a big garden. These are the stories of the many vegetables that she discovered on her journeys for the Land of Vegetation.

The wise woman was very good at fixing problems-like when food was too big for the Princess' mouth, or when the moon got too full and round, or when the clouds all rained at the same time and caused a flood. Whenever the Land of Vegetation faced a problem, the wise woman always found an answer and a new vegetable to go with it.

Sometimes she found new vegetables very far away, and she had to walk and walk and walk to get to them. (The wise woman was very good at walking.) She went on journeys to have tea with the sun or the moon, and once she walked all the way to the edge of the Land of Vegetation to invite the mist to live in the sky and turn into clouds.

Other times, the wise woman found new vegetables closer to the capital, Nutrition-like the time when the first thunderstorm happened and lightning struck the dirt, or the time when the ground was too cramped and needed to stretch out. On her many adventures, the wise woman discovered the radish, broccoli, green bean, potato, carrot, and several other vegetables for the people of the Land of Vegetation to eat.

Then the wise woman packed each new vegetable in a basket and went to visit the palace so that the King and the Queen and the Prince and Princess could name it. Sometimes, the names were silly, like "overalls," and sometimes they were more serious, like "sunburn." It just so happens that the words for overalls and sunburn in the Land of Vegetation were tomato and radish. And that is how the tomato, the radish, and all of the other vegetables came to be.