If you've been following this blog, you'll notice that most of my posts on plants have something to do with my mother or somehow find that thread to her. Her passion for plants was something i grew up with. She and my dad had this connection with flora that i suspect they had some kind of magic over them. It seemed that anything they grew would flourish right away. Of course i remember how they would lovingly attend to their plants, watering, weeding, fertilizing them. Plucking off parasites was de riguer, even wiping leaves with a damp cloth should dust accumulate on the surfaces and block sunlight from working its wonders.
They bought plant books, gardening equipment, and collected lots of plants whose names i will never forget because they taught them to us. "Could you water the Peperomia? Could you pinch off the young tips from the Coleus? Why did you pluck the flowers of the Yellow Lady Slipper without asking my permission?"
I remember we had a Fishtail Palm or Caryota. I was fascinated with how each leaf resembled a fish tail. Everything connects in nature. Who we are, our memories, the things around us...We are but in one big space and time continuum where all is one.
“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we're frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We ARE history!Everything we've ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are. Would you like the rest of the story?
I'm made up of the memories of my parents and my grandparents, all my ancestors. They're in the way I look, in the color of my hair. And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think. ”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld, #32)
