When did your passion for flowers/gardening start?

"He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul."
- Celia Thaxter

I just add this quote to the favorite gardening quotes thread and it made me think about when I first realized that I had a passion for gardening. Why don't we share some of our earliest memories of flowers or gardening. I have a couple I can think of, but here is the one that is the most vivid to me:

The first flowers I remember clearly were white water lilies that I saw floating in a pond at a park. I was 2 and a half years old at the time and had been feeling rather displaced from my position of youngest child in the family by the birth of my twin brothers a few months before. My mother recognized this and took me on a special trip to a park we had never been to before. I remember walking along in my new white sandles, white sundress and bonnet and being so thrilled with all the sights of spring in the park and also the joy of having my mother all to myself. It was then that we came to the pond and I saw my first waterlilies. How amazing it seemed to me that flowers could float on top of the water! Plus they were the largest flowers I had seen up to that time. A terrible longing began to develop in my little head. As soon as my mother was busy talking to another mother in the park I ran back to look at them again. For some reason the waterlilies made me think of how Ivory soap floated in the bathtub and I had this picture of what a joy it would be to lay in a bathtub and have a waterlily floating in the tub with me. In spite of the fact that I was a rather timid child, who dreaded getting scolded, I began to wade a little ways into the pond until I got closer and closer to the beautiful flower I desired. So much for the new white sandals being white. Naturally just as I leaned over trying to reach for that wonderous flower, I slipped and fell head first into the slimey, green pond water and nearly scared my mother to death! Walking home covered with green scum and mud, I no longer looked like such a sweet, pretty little girl! I did feel really bad about scaring my mother, ruining my new clothes and getting scolded, but the worst part of the whole experience was that I didn't even get the flower I desired so much, but I do remember dreaming for months afterwards about bathing in a tub full of waterlilies and have had a love of flowers every since.

Please share some of your early memories with us all or maybe you did not start gardening until later in life. What gave you the desire to start?

Susan





This message was edited Jul 19, 2004 7:56 AM

This message was edited Jul 19, 2004 7:57 AM

The first garden I remember clearly belonged to my paternal grandmother. I was 4 and my family had just recently moved back to NE where she lived. Her back yard was rather small and she had a single clothes line running from the house to the garage. A narrow, dirt path ran under the clothes line and tall flowers were planted on both sides, nearly bursting the seams of the tiny yard. When we would go to visit her, my bothers and sisters liked to play on the front porch while the adults visited inside, but I liked to go alone into the back yard and lay down on my back on the path .The only flowers I knew the names of were the Hollyhocks which seemed to me to almost reach the sky as I looked up at them. That was when I first knew that one day I would have a wild and seam-bursting garden of my own. And today I do!

Susan

This message was edited Jul 19, 2004 7:59 AM

This message was edited Jul 19, 2004 8:45 PM

I remember always having a passion for plants, but I think the turning point was a long visit to my grandmother in Oregon. I must have been 7, and she was taking a course on Botany at her local college. She took me on walks through her woods and told me about every plant in there, showed me her press and how to mount the specimens in an herbarium, and best of all, taught me about 'foraging'. She inspired a passion for botany in me that in turn brought me to gardening, to better know the plants themselves.

Cedar

My love for plants didn't happen until this year. I wrote all about it when I joined DG. You can read my story here

http://davesgarden.com/t/436122/

When I was growing up on a farm in KY, gardening was a given part of the summer. We had a huge vegetable garden to provide the food we ate much of the year. We had to get up early and worked very hard. It wasn't exactly welcome for an adolescent. After we moved away from that farm when I was 13, it took many years before I had an interest in it on my own! Then, when I was a freshman in college, I went home with a friend for the weekend and her parents were both avid gardeners, of the flower variety. I was fascinated by what they had done, I had never seen anything like it. They worked side by side every single day and it was a labor of love, unlike my sweaty childhood memories. Well, that was it for me. They gave me a start of mint to make their famous mint tea, which I still drink to this day. They still garden, 20 years later, and so do I.

Darn it, that wasn't the pic I wanted, guess I should use that preview feature. This one is a bit better of the flowers themselves. Haven't shown my front garden yet, it's still a work in progress. Hope you like it.

I first became fascinated with flowers when I was around 5. My birthday is in June and every year, the roses would bloom a week before my birthday. We had lilac, peony and azalea around our house and I was always enthralled with the colors. My parents are NOT gardeners but my mother loves a beautiful flower. Our neighbors had tiger lilies growing on the border of our driveway, and our other neighbor had grape vines. I was fascinated with the red tulip bulbs my mom planted one year......

In addition, in first grade our teacher encouraged us to go on a 'signs of spring' walk. I started taking those walks with my mother every year; we could look for crocus and check out the buds emerging on the cherry trees. I hope to do the same with my son who will be 3 next year. He already wants to go outside and look at the flowers, and my husband's parents are very into gardening, so I'm hoping I can instill a love of plants at an early age!

When I was small, we lived in an apartment in Vienna, Austria,
My Parents did not have a garden, we lived a very urban life, but I remember all the beautiful flowers in the window boxes most our neighbors had.
Vienna has beautiful parks and gardens but my earliest recollection was the farm where we spent summer time with my grandparents who lived near the Hungarian border. Grandmother had a kitchen garden where she grew all her herbs and vegetables and some flowers. One flower's scent fascinated me, it was Phlox, every day I went out there to smell it. Many years later and first married, I started a garden in my back yard and you guessed it, the first flowers I planted were Phlox, that was 57 years ago.
To this day when I smell my Phlox I think of Grand Mother's garden and her beautiful Phlox.

I was probably two or three, and my grandfather had a greenhouse, where he would give me gladiolus taller than I was! It began a lifetime fascination with plants. I grew up in the city, but we had a rose garden underplanted with zinnias and some bleeding hearts toward the shadier ends. There was a huge urn in the center filled with coleus, which amazed me how they would wilt from the hot sun, then recover immediately when watered. The boundary fence was covered with wistaria, underplanted with ivy... I must have been five or so when I divided all the hostas from the front yard ( from under the hedges) and made a border of the wistaria bed. We had the "green" kind... And there were bearded iris, which are still with me after countless moves, along with the ventricosa hosta. Great memories of how it all began!

Edited to add the daylily interest began with a long row of Hemerocallis fulva along the garage at the summer house...these were in bloom every July during vacation. No matter how many wonderful new hybrids I've seen, these roadside lilies still awaken something primitive in me...

This message was edited Jul 21, 2004 2:52 PM

Hmmmm, I never thought I would have a passion for gardening until about 4 years ago when I finally didn't travel for a living any longer. Soon thereafter I joined DG so I could learn, and THEN the memories flooded back from my childhood.

I can still remember the smell of night-blooming jasmine coming in the window at my beloved grandfather's house, and the of gardenias in a wooden planter in his front yard, from my grandmother's funeral.

And, I remember the mango seed and avocado seeds he helped me plant at about 4 years of age which later became mature trees in his yard.

I grew up in a pecan orchard and the bunch of yard and garden my mother had, she had me out there with a steak knife digging weeds.
But I didn't get it. All of those poppies and iris. yikes.

I tried gardening many times after home but was impatient and learned how to tend and propgate iris and roses but they just were not my thing.

Then while living in Wales, I had a friend nuts for plants. I started wanting to get it but I was too daft and young. Then, a couple of years later and maybe 10 years ago, a friend of my mother's who is lovely, insprational and absolutely certifiable, showed me how to just throw down some landscape fabric, a bag of potting soil and some lettuce seeds. Wow. I can feed us with pretties!!!

BTW- I still weed with a steak knife.

Grew up on a family farm. Joined 4-H when I was 8 yrs old.
My project was potatoes, so I raised all the potatoes for our family for a number of years. My brother & I would hear the yields from the potato farms in the Red River Valley, so we would have to try & match that. Can't remember how we came out, although we always had plenty of taters.
As I got older I added vegetable gardening to my project list.
In high school I joined FFA & had some field crops. So I guess I really never was without some kind of growing thing going on.
It's still fun to see how big of crop you can get or how nice a certain flower grows. I guess it's in my genes to always try for thebest that can be!
Bernie

Two years ago I quit smoking, that would be about the time I put a round flowerbed in at the site of a former pine tree. All the roots that had been ground up, decomposed and made great soil. I put a bird bath in the circle surrounding it with mexican heather and fountain grass.

Next I got my dh to tie a rope to the ugly misshapen croton bushes in the front bed and yanked them out with his pickup truck..............

It went on and on and on.

We have addictive behavior that runs in the family, I can't say that this is the least expensive of addictions, but it sure is the healthiest and I've having so much fun and learning new things every day, meeting some wonderful people!

:^))))
Molly

When I was a little girl (from about age 5 to 9), I had an older lady neighbor that was always patient and kind to me, allowing me to follow her around in the evenings. I can still remember how her gardens looked and the many bouquets of flowers I carried home.

In addition, my father always loved flowers and I have fond memories of him dividing iris and daffodils to share with folks. He was the only dad I knew that when to the nurseries every spring to buy flowers to fill our planters.

I carried these memories with me - - planting a few flowers now and again. But I didn't really become a gardener until five years ago when I bought an older home that had real dirt, not just the red clay found at most newer homes. Gardening literally changed my life - - giving a creative outlet to a passion that I never knew that I had. Gardening is calming, rewarding, frustrating, expensive, time consuming, exciting, ever changing, surprising, and an important part of my "leisure" time. Nat

It seems many of us developed an interest in gardening from our grandparents. Some of my earliest recollections are my paternal grandmother's yard in Gary, Indiana. She lived in a house that was little more than a shack, but she always had wonderful flowers in her yard, and a lovely tall weeping willow tree. I was very young, and I don't recall the names of the flowers, except the hollyhocks. I was allowed to pick the blooms and play with them. I imagined them as dolls with full, pink skirts. She also showed me how to squeeze the 'jaws' of the snapdragons to make them talk.

Both my mother and father gardened. Dad was the vegetable gardener, and my mother grew most of the perennials in our beds. Dad always grew a couple rows of gladiolas, zinnias and Old Fashioned Garden Mix in his veggie garden so that he would have flowers for the bouquets he shared with everyone. I have fond memories of heading out to his garden with my brother to eat cukes and tomatoes right off the vine, warm from the sun.

I have gardened in small ways, a flower bed or two, over the years, but it always seemed my husband was looking for greener pastures, and I never had a chance to really 'garden'. Over the years, I used to have dreams of moving into a house somewhere that had a greenhouse attached and a yard for a garden. I was always disappointed when I woke up!

Dennis & I were married in 1991 and we moved into our log home shortly after that. The first spring, he built flower beds around the south and west sides of the house for me. Over the years, we've put in long hours of hard labor to make the lovely gardens and beds we have today.

I became interested in starting plants from seed when a good friend of mine down the road suggested I could save money on bedding plants. I made some huge mistakes in the first couple seasons, but slowly I learned. In 1999, after sharing the diningroom table with seedlings for a couple years, my husband built me a little greenhouse and today, I have a little nursery business in our small town.

I cannot remember NOT gardening. It was always part of day to day life. There were always flowers and veggies at our house. I cannot say that canning was my favorite childhood task but it beat the heck out of plucking turkeys!

Great thread! My earlierst gardening memories are also with my grandfather, a first generation Italian in a small suburan lot outside of Philadelphia. I had leg braces as a little kid, so while my brother and sister were out playing kickball with the big kids, he'd take me out in the garden and talk to me about his flowers and fruit trees. He also had a huge (at least in my memory) vegetable garden. I was fascinated that you could go out, pick a tomato and eat it for lunch that same day.

Over the years, my dad's gardens got bigger and bigger. When we moved to our house in Mont Vernon, NH, he put in vegetable gardens that were probably about a half acre in size, completely surrounded by a fence of sweet peas. As a teenager, I was "trouble" and was constantly being grounded. Their idea of punishment was to send me out to the gardens to weed. Little did they know they were nurturing a passion I still carry 30 years later! Today, I have two large vegetable beds, 2 kinds of cultivated raspberries (thornless, to boot), three perenial beds and annuals galore. When we bought our house in Vermont 4 years ago, we had to do quite alot of interior work to make our house liveable. I couldn't wait to get that all done so I could start the real work of making the outside as lovely as I could. My gardens are probably the most important part of me, and I couldn't imagine not having the land, time or capacity for them.

leisurelee, makes my eyes tear up to hear your wonderful story. Thanks!

Frogsrus, my gardening history is very similar to yours. When i was a child and had to help my parents in our large gardens I didn;t consider it fun, just work, but all those lessons learned then stayed with me. Only now most of the time gardening is fun (except when the weeds get ahead of me). Donna

Darius, I'm so glad I finally found a "community" of folks who get it!