Flower memories from my childhood:

-my grandmother's flowers......their yard got lots of abuse from kids, chickens, cats, dogs .....I don't remember there ever being so much as one blade of grass in the yard, just slick dirt. But, I do remember how she took what life gave her and managed to make something beautiful from it. Laying all over the yard area were old metal wash tubs and tires, filled to the brims with flowers she had planted, -she was doing container gardening years before it became known to others! Her flowers grew so profusely, you could barely see the containers. Mostly, I remember learning to love Moss Rose and 'hens and chickens' from her garden.

-my mother's flowers when I was pre-seven, and we lived in a trailor. She had many all around the little yard perimeter...sweet williams, 4 o:clocks, zinnias, pansies making funny faces at me, gladiolas ...but the thing so magical to me, was that at the end of the attached trailer awning, she had strings running down as climbing supports. On these strings grew a fairy land wall of Heavenly Blue Morning Glories. I played beside the wall, stuck my nose in the trumpets and breathed in deep until they caressed my nose, gazing at the twirl of color in the long unopened buds, that were showing blue and white twists.

-the small unopened yellow tulip a friend brought buy the trailor, early one morning when I was too sick to go to school.

-Huge sunflowers, towering over me, smiling down at me, planted in a cornfield that we played hide-and-seek in.

-After the flood, our new trailor was destroyed and we moved to a rental property while looking for a house to buy. I remember wild violets growing profusely by the fence, we would sit in the yard shaded by a hugh weeping willow tree and string the violets on a thread to wear.

-When I was 7, we moved into our house, and over the years, our yard there was filled with lilacs. When we went to Kentucky to visit my mother's mother, my parents dug up and brought back lilacs from there, where they seemed to grow wild. Also brought back were wild rose bushes and flowering almond.

-Forsynthia bushes, received on Arbor Day by all the school children, bursting into a profusion of sparkling yellow sunshine, thru out the neighborhood, every spring.

-When I look at the white clover in my grass, I'm reminded of the days of sitting in the grass and plucking one up, making a slit in the stem and inserting the next one's stem into the slit....and so forth until a necklace was made.

-Queen Anne's Lace, as a child I put a drop of food coloring in a glass of water and put in a fresh gathered stem of Queen Anne's Lace, and waited expectantly to see how much color it would take in.

-"Home-made plants" - taking a pinto bean and putting it in a narrow jar with paper towel or cotton to hold it against the glass, then adding water and waiting for it to sprout and form a vine. Also works with a piece of sweet potatoe, cut with a an 'eye' and stick tooth picks in it so it is situated over the opening in a jar, with just the end sticking down in the water...soon the sprout appears. I need better info on exactly how to situate the potatoe, it is grown foggy after so many years, anyone? I want to try some of these again, my budget is very tight right now!

-pennies...ha, ha...of planting them as instructed by my father, and waiting for the penny tree to come up!

-my father telling me that, one evening, he was watering the flowers and one opened up and he saw something inside ....something so small he thought it must be an insect, and put it in a jar to take fishing. But, he didn't go for a few days. Later, when looking in the jar, he began to notice changes...and excitedly told my Mom, "Look! this is growing arms and legs, we better keep it and see what it turns out to be!" Guess who?

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Uploaded June 30, 2001
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