Through a Child's Eyes
We walk the quarter mile to the mailbox every day but Sunday, and frankly there is rarely much to see along the one-lane gravel road. The clay banks support more “weeds” than wildflowers, and I have to admit I must not have been paying attention—until yesterday.
Our eight-year-old grandson is with us for a week, and he made the mail trip with us yesterday. His first “assignment” after his dad drove off on the way back to Knoxville was to think about what he would put in his field notebook I gave him to record “things we did, places we went, people I met, creatures we saw or smelled or tasted…etc”
So here is a list of our “findings” on the postal round trip yesterday, starting with the only picture I gleaned from the short walk and the “discovery” I was most enthused about:
1) Mole Plant
This is the first mole plant I’ve seen since we moved to Floyd County. It is a “euphorb” with a unique flowering structure. Many are succulent and adapted to very dry conditions (like the road bank along Rock Hill Church Road). Euphorbs are the eastern-hemisphere counterpart (parallel evolution) to our cacti. It’s efficacy in repelling moles is not well established, I think, but I might save some seeds to plant near our new blueberry bushes.
2) Catnip (our cat was a non-responder. Some cats don’t get it.
3) Greenbrier (smilax) growing tips—even the tender thorns are edible
4) Mullein or “Mountain Toilet paper”
5) scratch and sniff bird cherry
6) oriental bittersweet vine almost 3 inches in diameter
7) Gnaphalium or cudweed
8) Sassafras scratch and sniff
9) Buttercup (Ranunculus)
10) Dewberry in flower
11) Autumn Olive
11) Wood Sorrel or sourgrass: Oliver was able to tell from the leaf resembled a clover (but is not in the same family—a case of two families creating the same leaf shape. Or was there a common ancestor in their deep past?
I think so far only maybe three of these made it to the “field notebook” so I will be sure young Ollie gets a copy of this as a reminder.