by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 04, 2010

David Wiesner has won three Caldecott Medals, plus two more Caldecott honors. But just after winning the first one, he turned to an imaginative story about the future. It's called "June 29, 1999" - but he wrote and illustrated it in 1992. Its title page shows the sun lighting cumulus clouds high in the sky - but on this mysterious day, the sky is also filled with over a dozen red balloons.

Each balloon carries a tiny cargo - a suspended box filled with soil and vegetables. Plastic tubes irrigate the sky-bound crops, but Wiesner's text first hangs on to his mystery a little longer. He reveals the balloons' origin - Ho-Ho Kus, New Jersey - and the person responsible for them, a young scientist named Holly Evans. But it's his pictures that tell the story, as Evans stares intently at her beakers of soil, and her boxes are revealed to be labeled with the pictures from packages of seeds.

"On May 11, after months of careful research and planning, Holly Evans launches vegetable seedlings into the sky..."

It's an experiment, Wiesner explains on the second page, with the balloons drifting for several weeks, until the scientist can measure their growth. Wiesner draws a crowded classroom that's filled with skeptical students. But all the realistic details and drawings are leading to a big surprise.  On June 29, "shortly after sunrise," a Montana hiker discovers a foggy valley that's now filled with house-sized...turnips!

"All over the country, the skies fill with vegetables," Wiesner explains on the next page, and he moves closer to the story-telling format that made him famous. The drawings are surreal - as a diner's power lines are shown propping up dozens of giant lettuce heads. But Wiesner keeps the text to the minimum, preferring to let his pictures do the talking. "Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beams loom over Levittown.

"Artichokes advance on Anchorage. Parsnips pass by Providence..."

Ironically, even the scientist's front yard is hit by an enormous stalk of broccoli. And one Iowa farmer is thrilled by the giant cabbage leaf in his field, sure that now he can finally win himself a ribbon at the state fair. (Though there's rabbits in his field that are also very excited!) In the painted desert of New Mexico, there's enormous beans surrounded by a flock of sheep. Ship-sized peas float down the river, passing gracefully under a trestle railroad bridge where a train transports a giant eggplant. And the giant red peppers simply float, tantalizingly, like hot air balloons, until tiny people on the ground throw ropes to the clouds and pull them down to earth.

It's children's book science fiction, as Wiesner plays out his "what if" scenario. Could the pumpkins be turned into real estate? Could you use a tree saw to make guacamole? And more importantly, where'd the avocado come from? It wasn't one of the vegetables in Holly's original experiment!

She stares curiously at the blue-green sky, with a crescent moon at sunset, in a beautiful drawing that suggests she'll never know the answer.. Wiesner waits to the final two pages before his fantasy explains the mystery to his readers. So where did the giant vegetables come from?

From a clumsy alien cook flying in an Arcturian starcruiser!

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