Jul 07 2007
My First Botany Lesson
This was inspired by Urban Thought’s post about how One Man’s Flower Is Another Man’s Weed.
I remember rambling all over the city as a child. I was about 8 or 9 years old.
Mom didn’t know how to drive so she’d plot out all these routes. She would make copies of the city map (this was before the Internet) and cut out sections. Each section was some area we (she) wanted to explore.
She had the bus schedule and she’d color in the maps with colored pencils and highlighters. She got pretty elaborate.
I’d be out of school and she was a stay-at-home mom. While I was probably pretty happy with just watching TV and reading, she wanted to get out of the house. She’d pack up a canvas tote bag for each of us; put on one of her straw hats and off we’d go.
I wasn’t into it. I sighed and shifted the tote bag from shoulder to shoulder and wonder if she’d let me eat a snack.
The tote would be filled with several sandwich-sized Alligator baggies, one would contain Cheerios, another Pretzel Sticks, another Corn Pops, each closed with a red twist-tie.
Sometimes we’d have Cheez-Its. Mom would dole a few out as needed. Corn Pops were dessert. I didn’t get to eat many of those. I’d scrape the salt crystals off the Pretzel Sticks and nibble on them using only my incisors.
Mom was more of a kid than I was. She’s pick up snails with her bare hand, show me their shells, how their antennae retracted. She’d pick up caterpillars and point out beetles. We’d return home from these walks with “specimens” stored in plastic vegetable bags.
Mom would then go to the library or bookstore and try to find out what types of flowers we’d brought home. I learned that the flowers that dotted the hills around the city were wild fennel, wild radish, mustard, and sweet alyssum. Mom had all the flower books spread out on the formal dining room table-now-worktable.
One day she held up a single wild radish flower.
“See this?” pointing to its cuplike base. “This is the sepal and inside is the ovary.”
She then laid the flower on a cutting board and with a steady hand, sliced it in half with an X-acto. This was pretty cool.
I leaned in to look closer.
“Flowers have male parts and female parts, the male part being the stamens,” she said pointing to the minuscule hair-like parts of the radish, “and a female part called the pistil.”
She went on to explain how pollination worked and how the base of the flower, the ovule would swell with seeds after the petals had dried up.
“This is the same way we get fruit,” she told me. “You know how fruits have seeds? Well, fruits start out as a flower first, then the flower is pollinated and then the ovary swells with fruit.”
I began to see the world in an entirely new way.
I felt I was in on a secret.
Mom had shown me the quiet world: the world most of us miss.
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Sounds like she was setting you up for “the talk.”
Ricardo: My parents and I had “the talk” sometime before that. It was never no big deal – I knew about ovaries and the technical terms for “pee-pee” and “wee-wee.”
I wasn’t raised with any shame about nudity. No mysteries there.
Excellent Ms.Q.
Excellent.
Oh man! My kind’a mom for CERTAIN! I LOVE public transportation, colored pencils, maps & exploring! My kids have already learned to groan…
Have you ever read Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver? You reminded me of this part:
“Re your question about botany: tell your students plants do everything animals do – give birth, grow, travel around (how do you think palm trees got to Hawaii?) have sex, etc. They just do it a lot slower. Bear this in mind: flowers are the sex organs of plants. Tell the boys to consider that when they’re buying their dates corsages for the prom.”
Your mother was an explorer. I like her approach on life.
My mom never had “the talk” with me though. I wonder… I should ask her why.
Ricardo: I was trying to recall how they actually told me about dah boids and dah bees and I don’t think they ever really did a formal “This is what it’s all about.” I think I was as young as 5 or 6 and my dad was showing me this picture book of a baby curled up in the womb and then some stuff about how this [anatomical term] went into that [anatomical term] and yadda-yadda and I was a bit bored by it all and wanted to play with my stuffed animals.
It was all quite matter of fact and when I hit puberty (or when it hit me!) I knew what it was all about and wasn’t in any big rush to scratch any itches and make big ole life-changing mistakes!
Jill: So you’re dragging your kids around, too? You probably use Ziplocs instead of those Alligator baggies!
I haven’t read Barbara Kingsolver as yet. BUT I just checked out “High Tide In Tuscon”, a book of her essays upon a friend’s recommendation.
UT: My mom has her own unique view of life and in her own words, “I know I’m not normal.” She’ll be showing up again!
Your mom sounds pretty straight up – I wonder why she never had The Talk? Guess you can ask her that along with if she’s had a mammagram!
She might have thought I’d figure it out by myself.
UT: Probably. You sound like you’ve figured out a lot of things on your own and if you weren’t obviously looking like you had no idea what was going on, she may not have wanted to bring it up.
Although…at the age when “the talk” generally happens, most teenagers want to appear cool, like, oh yeah, I know what is going on. So..who knows. You may just want to ask her what her thoughts on that were just to know.
My wife gave me a lesson in botany once.
I thought I was doing her a favor in pulling those weeds out of her stonework. Little did I know that those were not weeds but some sort of ground cover she had been “nurturing” for years!
From that day forward I have never done a lick of gardening. I’m not about to get in trouble for pulling “weeds” again!
HMTKSteve: Hmm. That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, huh?
HMTK Steve – YIKE! & ummm…yeah…that’s exactly why I don’t garden either…
Ms.Q – I haven’t tried her essays yet. I don’t know why, because Poisonwood Bible & Animal Dreams are two of my very favorite fiction books. I really do need to take a look at High Tide in Tuscon.