A Tree Is Nice
by Marc Simont
Summary
In plain, short sentences, Janice May Udry lists the reasons a tree is nice: it gives shade in summer, drops leaves to jump in come fall, grows apples to eat, holds a swing or a treehouse, and gives a place to lean a ladder or lie underneath and watch its branches move. There is no character and no plot beyond that accumulating list, closing with the suggestion that a child might want to plant a tree of their own, a small hole dug and a sapling set into the ground, so that it can eventually do all these same things for somebody else. Marc Simont illustrates the list in alternating full color spreads and quieter black and white pages, letting the trees themselves stretch the full height of the book's tall trim size, and giving the child figures throughout the loose, unfussy line that marked his work across a long illustration career.
It reads almost like a picture book length poem more than a story, and its plain, declarative sentences suit reading aloud to very young children who are still learning why the ordinary things around them, in this case something as unremarkable as a tree, might actually be worth noticing. Nothing about the book asks for suspense or resolution, and that absence of plot is exactly what makes it work as a bedtime book: there is nowhere for a child's attention to be pulled forward toward what happens next, only the quiet accumulation of one more good reason to like a tree, page after page.
Historical Context & Significance
A Tree Is Nice won the 1957 Caldecott Medal for a book Harper and Brothers published in 1956. That year's runners up were Marie Hall Ets's Mr. Penny's Race Horse, Tasha Tudor's 1 Is One, Paul Galdone's Anatole, James Daugherty's Gillespie and the Guards and William Pène du Bois's Lion.
Kirkus Reviews praised the text for a kind of poetic simplicity innate in small children, and critic Norma R. Fryatt later called the book one of the most convincing sermons on conservation yet done for young children, without the book ever using the word itself. This was an early credit in what became a career of more than a hundred illustrated books for Simont, who had already received a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for The Happy Day and would receive a second Honor decades later, in 2002, for The Stray Dog, a book he wrote and illustrated himself, giving him recognition under the medal across parts of six different decades.