The persistence of memory

My mother had roses, deep red and fragrant. — pirate_renee/Flickr

Return with me now to the days of yesteryear, when you were a child and the world was new.

Can you remember the yard where you grew up, the trees and flowers that grew there, the secret, hidden places beneath the shrubs? I’ll bet you do. Back when summer days were endless, close encounters with the natural world were all in a day’s play.

I can shut my eyes even now and tour the yard of my childhood home. Stride up the front walk between twin barberries, skirt the privet hedge and slip through the gate. Right there at the back stoop grew pink tea roses, perfectly formed and no bigger than a 2-year-old’s palm.

Behind the house were towering shrub roses, deep red and fragrant, that were my mother’s joy. Out around the stone barbecue were daffodils, then English irises. Beside the driveway grew spiderwort and orange "tiger lilies" — really the common day lily, but we called them tigers because a deep sniff of their faint perfume would paint our cheeks with pollen whiskers.

Most everyone my age, I think, has these happy green memories. Kids and plants make friends easily, especially when the green things have a bit of personality — and best of all are plants that actually do something.

How many of you had Venus fly traps, those sinister little devils with the toothy grins? I’ll bet you showed every other kid in the neighborhood how, by touching the trigger hairs three times, you could make that scary maw snap shut. And how any ant or gnat you shook onto the trap in just the right spot was doomed, utterly doomed.

Another good one is the sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, a tender houseplant with feathery leaves that, when touched or stroked, actually fold up right in front of your eyes. So cool! I saw these at the Well-Sweep Herb Farm in Hunterdon County, where the kids had to squeeze past me to have a try at spooking these ever-so-shy little plants.

Venus flytrap - did you have one? — Free the Image/Flickr

And then there’s snapdragons. I still can’t understand how there are people in the world who don’t know how these bright annuals of summer got their name. Gently squeeze an individual blossom at the back of its jaws and its "mouth" springs open; there, deep in the flower’s depths, is a prong that looks like a dragon’s snaggle tooth. (Draw on some eyes, and name it Puff.)

How about maple seeds, those whirlygig things that descend in a spiral, like miniature helicopters? Surely you recall that each half, split at the fat end, can be pressed onto your nose and will stick there, held on by a gummy bit of sap. Pinocchio noses, we called them.

And dandelions, gone to fluff — we blew at them repeatedly, counting down the hours, to tell the time (well, sort of). One o’clock, two o’clock ... until all the tiny parachutists clustered on the seed head took off for parts unknown. This was related, of course, to the "Loves me, loves me not" petal-plucking we practiced on helpless daisies.

Flowers that open magically, on cue, are another kid-friendly phenomenon. The old-fashioned annuals called four o’clocks, Mirabilis jalapa, open promptly at teatime; the morning glories unfold with the first kiss of the sun; the moon flowers, Ipomoea alba, fling wide their ghostly white blossoms by the light of the moon.

As I sit and write, I realize how deep and clear are my memories of tree and vine, fruit and flower, early met and never forgotten. If you can revisit your own plant "firsts" as happily, I want to say this: “Psst! Pass it on — tell the kids.”

The poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, but he was grown up by then, with an adult’s sophistication. I first saw the world in a 50-by-100-foot suburban plot — a vast place of jungle, forest and plain that shrank remarkably as I grew.

I’m still playing with the plants, though, and don’t plan to stop. I’m dedicated to the proposition that you can get older without ever really growing up.