A gorgeous environmental story to make children think

The environment is now one of the most popular themes in picture books, with titles such as Questions and Answers about Plastic and What a Waste urging children to consider their responsibilities to Earth. But it’s the writers who take a more imaginative approach who tend to get their message across most effectively.

Emma Carlisle’s lyrical nature books are an excellent case in point. Two years ago, in What Do You See When You Look at a Tree?, she used a combination of watercolour drawings and gentle rhyming text to explore what happens when a tree yields to the shifting seasons: “Look closer and you’ll see so much more. / Trees are all different, special, unique… / Just like the trees long before”.

This time, in Time Runs Like a River, she uses the same combination of verse and artwork to consider the concept of time through the ebb and flow of a waterway: “Time runs past like a river, / The seconds drip by like drops. / Each minute trickles, an hour ripples, / But time never slows down and stops.”

We’re led on this journey by two nameless young children, who are pictured floating leaves on the water, spying on deer, and chasing after birds and dandelion seeds. But in contrast to the conventions of the modern picture-book, the story contains no dialogue, leaving it to the narrator to articulate what the children see.

Some of the observations are fleeting: a “kingfisher darting past”; clouds “forming shapes in the sky”. For the most part, however, Carlisle’s focus is more philosophical, as the narrator urges the reader to consider time’s ephemeral nature: “We don’t feel time as it passes by. / We can’t see it move through the air. / Yet the events of the past, / and the changes that last, / Can be seen almost everywhere.”

Carlisle’s previous picture books include the cosily anarchic pre-school story Bears at the Beach (2016), in which a little bear goes missing at the seaside and is saved by his kite (“The beach is not for lying on, it’s for playing on!”). Here, in contrast, the artwork has a more haunting quality, and the book’s central thought – that “time’s dance is never quite done” – offers plenty for more mature readers, not just four-to-seven-year olds, to think about.

Carlisle says that the story was inspired by an afternoon spent on the banks of the river Dart in her native Devon, watching wagtails and searching for beavers. Few are likely to compare Time Runs Like a River to the work of Alice Oswald, a former Oxford Professor of Poetry, whose collection Dart took root from the same landscape and won the TS Eliot Prize. But Carlisle’s verse has its own enchantments – and the lessons about nature’s fragility are stronger for being gently served.

Time Runs Like a River is published by Templar at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books