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Laura and I picked milkweed pods and
opened them to feel the scale-shaped seeds overlapping like the
skin of a dragon.
Margaret Atwood, in The Blind
Assassin -
see What's Coming Up #135
Kids can lose themselves for a lifetime in the endless
variety in flowers and pods, looking, feeling, and taking in the
nearly magical transformations. Above, Nigella
damescena seed pod -- when love in a mist becomes devil
in a bush. Below, old fashioned bleeding heart (Dicentra
spectabilis) becomes lady-in-a-bath, and lambs ear lives up to
its name.
Gardening is restorative. It brings us
back to the things we thought we had lost in childhood. It brings
us back to our senses -- to the downy feel of the leaves of silver
sage; to the perfume of jasmine and gardenias; to the taste of
spearmint; to the sound of bamboo rustling in the sudden rush of
wind before a storm; to the cool white beauty of a moonflower
unfolding as dusk turns to night.
- Allen Lacy, in The Inviting
Garden -
see What's Coming Up #83
Gardens are full of all kinds of life waiting to be seen,
held, carried to show an tell in a custom-made box...
Take them into the garden young and
at your eye level. Nature will always be part of their world
view.
- Janet & Steven -
Don't know why you
feel compelled to do
a thing a certain way?
Bet you saw someone
doing it just that way
when you were two.
- Janet
-
...there are some notable differences
between those of us who started gardening when we were children and
our brothers and sisters of the spade who came to the pursuit later
in life -- the late bloomers, so to speak. ...They are serious
gardeners... as for the rest of us, we started out as children and
something of the child remains in us. Gardening may be work but it
begins as play -- something spontaneous, with no restrictive
rules.
- Allen Lacy, in The Gardener's
Eye and Other Essays -
see What's Coming Up #89
Another remnant of childhood to which
I confess is a yen for plants that serious gardeners hold in low
account, especially gaudy ones that lack a shred of pretence to
modesty...
- Allen Lacy, in The Gardener's
Eye and Other Essays -
see What's Coming Up #74
How they love the gaudy poppy, lily, peony...
Above: Only one ripe tomato to
pick from your garden today? Kid rules say to have the most fun
with it you can; give it to Thomas the turtle.
Below: One young boy and 3 "bigger kids" help
the keeper offer their garden's kale to a giraffe.
There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as
thrilling as gathering vegetables one has grown.
- Alice B. Toklas
-
(Caterpillars) have most
wonderful appetites and hardly stop feeding all day long... they
grow very quickly; and in a few days time they find their jackets
are much too tight for them. Then a most curious thing happens.
Their skins split right down the back, and they wriggle and twist
about... till at last they manage to creep out of them altogether
and appear in new ones, which had been gradually forming underneath
the old!
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get new suits of clothes, or new
frocks, as easily as this?
- Theodore Wood, Butterflies and
Moths Shown to Children -
Black swallowtail caterpillar ("parsley
worm")
devouring fennel.
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