Wall-E’s Garden Written and Illustrated by Nicole Barber Photograph CC by Kayla Casey,

Only a little while ago, the Earth wasn’t a very nice place to live. There were bad smells everywhere. My grandmother once told me the air used to be worse, which I can’t even imagine. Apparently, a long time ago, the Earth was clean. I’d heard stories that it used to be a great place to live, with clean air, plants, and other animals. I found that very hard to believe.

While there weren’t any other animal species, I had found a friend. He is a robot, and he looked after me. His name is Wall-E. Wall-E uses power to be able to run, but he gets his energy from the sun, so he isn’t making the air yuckier. Back when people lived on the Earth, so I’m told, they had different forms of making power that made the air very dirty. I was glad they’d gone away; the air was bad enough as it was without people making it even worse.

One day when I had been out with Wall-E while he worked, Wall-E found something beautiful. It was a plant. An actual plant, growing in the ground! I had never seen a plant before. It was so green! I didn’t know how it had grown, but I was so glad that it had. I guess Wall-E thought so too, because he picked it up and brought it back to our house.

After a while, Wall-E went away for a very long time. I don’t know where he went, but I missed him. Then he suddenly returned with a whole massive ship full of people. The old stories about people must have been true! I hoped the people wouldn’t make the Earth dirtier again, but they did seem keen to help clean it up.

One of the first things the leader of the people did was to plant our beautiful green plant in the ground and give it some water. Wall-E told me that plants need water to survive, and that they have roots in the ground that drink up the water and also get plant food from the soil. Wall-E told me that plants need the sun for energy just like he does!

Would you believe there are other animals here! One of the human children was playing in the dirt and found a worm. Wow! The Earth must really be recovering! Worms live underground, digesting the soil, making it better food for plants. Wall-E told me that worms eat dirt, dead leaves, and food scraps. But they don’t like onions and citrus peel. I don’t even know what onions and citrus peel are!

The people who came on the ship must have found out about different types of plants, because they started to plant some seeds. Maybe there was a special room on the space ship that held plants and animals. The seeds were all different sizes and shapes. The humans loosened the soil with a shovel and a pitchfork, and planted the seeds in little rows. Then they covered up the seeds with a bit of soil and watered them fairly often. They didn’t have to water the seeds when it rained, but I noticed they watered them enough to keep them damp all the time.

Nothing seemed to happen for a while. For weeks! I hadn’t known that growing food would take so long. Wall-E told me that it takes 80 days from planting carrots to being able to harvest them, 140 days to be able to harvest onions, and 100 days for tomatoes to be ready for picking. That’s a very long time for a cockroach! 80 days 140 days 100 days

Later, tiny seedlings started to appear. More seemed to appear every day for a little while. The children and even the adults were very excited, and ran around pointing to all the differently shaped plants. I was pretty excited too, I have to say. All this life, where only a short time ago there was nothing but rubbish and dirty air. Actually, Wall-E told me that the plants help make the air clean. It’s called photosynthesis. The plants take in carbon dioxide, use the sun and the green part of themselves (called chlorophyll) to make energy, and let out oxygen. Because they use up carbon dioxide and let out oxygen, they make the air easier to breathe.

The plants all started growing bigger and bigger with more and more leaves. Then some of them became even more beautiful…they started growing flowers on their stems! I liked the tomato flowers the best. They had lovely yellow petals, and yellow is my favourite colour. Photograph is CC by Theo Elliott,

When I went to look at my favourite yellow flowers one morning, there was a big buzzy creature flying around in and out of them! I started to panic, but then I found Wall-E, and he told me it was just a bee and I was not to worry. Apparently bees are needed to help the plants grow fruit. So the stripy bee buzzed from one flower to the next, collecting and spreading pollen. Wall-E was right, he wasn’t hurting my flowers.

Soon after the bee came, the flowers started to lose their petals. That’s when I got really excited, because I could see the tiny tomatoes starting to grow from where the flowers used to be. Day after day I would come and look at the growing garden, especially my tomatoes. They were green at first, but once they got really big (as big as me, some of them!), they turned red. That means they are now ripe. Photograph is CC by jayneandd,2010

I started running up the plant towards one of the tomatoes, just as a human came over to pick one. That was a mistake – I’d forgotten that humans don’t like cockroaches. The human screamed, and flicked me off the tomato. My tomato! Then the human ran towards me, and his big foot came stomping down right next to me. I turned and fled, running as fast as my little legs could carry me. I’m pretty quick, but the human was right behind me.

Luckily, around the corner of the garden bed I ran into Wall-E. Wall-E raised one of his eyebrows as I ran up him, and giggled as I ran over some of his sensors. I dared to look around Wall-E’s neck. The human had stopped very close to Wall-E, and seemed to be trying to explain that I was there. Wall-E told the human that I was his friend, and that in fact he himself would like the tomato that I had been “dirtying” (as the human said). The human didn’t look very happy about it, but he knew who Wall-E was and that he had helped them come back to Earth. So he handed over the tomato.

Wall-E took me back to our new house close to the garden, and put me down with my yummy tomato lunch. As I sat there, I looked across at the garden. It was still getting wider and longer, as the humans cleared away more and more rubbish, and planted more and more trees. The tree that was planted from the boot was taller than Wall-E now. The Earth is coming alive again. I only hope humans can make it healthy again, then keep it that way.