Hello to anyone reading…

Are you a gardener? A plant obsessive?

If not perhaps you will read on anyway and let me know if this method works for you too.

One of the many benefits of learning to identify plants is how they seem to be able to trigger memories once you can identify them elsewhere.

As a child my Grandma would teach me the names of the plants in her garden. It wasn’t formal… Just simply sharing a joy and passion with a loved one.

Being able to identify a tree or shrub or flower has had an interesting effect…

Nearly all of the powerful memories I recall involve plants or gardens. It is as if my mind seeks out plant life as a marker to remember by.

Lately as I drive to work this gorgeous Cassia Fistula is in bloom. What a stunner!

I stopped to take a photo (not just because this is a favourite tree) because each time I pass a new memory surfaces!

How curious!

Two little girls having a teddy bear picnic under a yellow waterfall of flowers. Jam and cream sandwiches Bare feet. A beloved best friend.

A white and brown Jack Russell who used to trot along with me as a teen. Scorching heat. Red dirt. Bright blue sky. Yellow spinifex.

As my sister’s dog she didn’t like me much either. But she would follow me and guard anyway. My little protector. As if she sensed the chaos within. I felt safe with her.

We planted a Cassia to honour her when she passed away.

Standing in an orchard next to a man who I have always been told I mirror (“Put a beard on her and she’d be her father”).

I see the leaves of a small tree that doesn’t fit with the fruit trees. He frowns. Ah bloody hell I poison and poison that thing and it keeps coming back!

I start to laugh and cannot stop. He looks horrified to hear he has been poisoning a Cassia fistula that Mum keeps giving TLC to try keep alive.

Does this happen to you too?

I wonder if you can store a happy memory to keep by focusing on a plant?

When the Cassia at our block flowers I think I will bring my husband out to kiss me under the tree.

Worth a try surely 😊. Cmon Cassia grow please.

13 thoughts on “Need a happy memory? Check your garden.”

  1. I must know too many specie to identify them with memories. However, there are many MANY plants that are identified with memories. At work there are several incense cedars, which is why my very first tree is. I still grow the same rhubarb that I got from my great grandfather before I was in kindergarten. I got my first pelargonium when I was in junior high school. It was a scrap I got from the neighbor’s trash pile. I still grow it now. Anyway, there are too many to list.

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    1. Oh wow! I love that you have the rhubarb your Great Grandad gave you. That is so special.
      And yes… Given how many plants you know it would be impossible to have a memory for each one.

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      1. Many of us from the Santa Clara Valley grow one of the two types of apricots that grew in the last scraps of orchard that we grew up with in the Santa Clara Valley, even though not many of us actually like the fruit . . . after growing up with so much of it.

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  4. Yes! I can never see a dandelion flower without remembering the wagonload of dandelion flowers my best friend Joni and I picked as girls. We had a plan to make them all into flower bracelets (there’s a way you can cut a small slit in the stem with your fingernail, then pass another flower stem through the hole to make a chain) and sell them on the corner. Although we worked all day, we did not make our fortune.

    On the other hand, emerging dandelion PLANTS always remind me of a very lucrative- for me- endeavor. My father had a beautiful one-acre suburban lawn and he hated for dandelions to mar it. He would pay us girls (his five daughters) one penny for each ten dandelion plants we dug out of the lawn. He set us to work in spring with a stiff butter knife and a paper grocery bag each. Only whole plants, with intact roots, counted toward the quota. I always filled my bag and often asked for another, but my sisters all soon wandered off. Clearly, I was the natural weeder of the family, and became a gardener. But although I always feel an instant urge to remove dandelions, I try to leave them now, for the bees.

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    1. That is such a beautiful story and such a gorgeous set of memories to look back on when you see a dandelion! I am so happy you shared that with me. Thank you!

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  5. Too many Cassia memories, and like you mentioned, most of my memories have flowers and tree in them, playing, sleeping, hiding.. they return in great detail whenever I spot those trees ..

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