My early plant memories are many; my family members were always gardening, landscaping, touring public gardens and discussing plants, how could I not?
By age six my vocabulary was peppered with Latin plant names; labels like liquidambar, festuca, dichondra, eucalyptus and philodendron fell from my young lips without a thought.
I wandered my grandmother's yard picking and eating oranges, guavas and berries, so I knew where my fruit came from, but not necessarily my food. Widowed early and working all her life my grandmother by then wasn't interested in canning or cooking, she was all about roses and pretty flowers.
{Do you have a funny or sweet early plant memory?}
Around this time we moved to an apartment building carved into a Southern California hillside populated with numerous rattlesnakes. Used to the planty paradise of our previous yards this environment was lacking in vegetation and entertainment. I remember playing with roly-poly bugs a lot and occasionally asking my dad to come kill a snake that had slithered onto the driveway. Ah, the innocent days before the Internet.
Today my kids will note that the Pacific Ocean was just blocks away. But back then at six, it was bleak when I wasn't beach combing or fishing. At the side of the driveway gray cinder-blocks held back the brown hillside for those "never rains in California" rainstorms that came in winter. Early spring would bring wild blue lupine and bright yellow mustard blooms on the hill. When I wasn't forever jumping off the cinder-blocks somehow not breaking my ankles, I would wonder at the mustard flowers. How did those yellow flowers become French's mustard?
One day I decided I was going to make mustard. I set about picking as many mustard flowers as I could find. I put them into some kind of bowl and tried to stir and grind them up, totally convinced that at any minute they would transform into the colorful condiment. I became so frustrated. But this might have been the first hint I would someday become a kitchen gardener. Yet it would be many years before I learned that it was not the flower but the seeds that made the mustard along with quite a bit of artificial food dye. This was not my only incident of food confusion.
Just imagine the day I learned that pickles were made of cucumbers and not bumpy green alligator skin I was so certain was the secret ingrdient!
