Plants and their childrenParsons, Frances Theodora
General
Plants and their children
Parsons, Frances Theodora
Botany -- Juvenile literature; Plants -- Juvenile literature
Yes, you have not forgotten those Saturdays in May. The trees were all
pink and white with apple blossoms. The air was sweet with fragrance,
and full of the voices of birds, and of bees that were bustling about
from flower to flower. No, indeed! you have not forgotten those happy
mornings. What is more, you never will. They are among the things that
will stay by you, and be a rest and help to you all your lives. I wish
there were no child living that might not carry with him always the
memory of May days in an apple orchard.
How has it come about, do you suppose, that these trees which in May
were covered with flowers are now heavy with apples?
Can any of you children answer this riddle? How have these great apples
managed to take the place of the delicate apple blossoms?
There are some children who keep their eyes open, and really see
what is going on about them, instead of acting as if they were quite
blind; and perhaps some such child will say, “Oh, yes! I know how it
happened. I have seen it all,” and will be able to tell the whole
story at once.
I should like very much to meet that boy or girl, and I should like to
take a country walk with him or her; for there are so few children, or
grown people either, who use both their eyes to see with, and the brain
which lies back of their eyes to think and question with, that it is a
rare treat to meet and to go about with one of them.
But I should be almost as much pleased to meet the child who says,
“Well, I know that first the blossoms come. Early in May they make the
orchard so nice to play in. But in a few days they begin to fall. Their
little white leaves come dropping down like snowflakes; and soon after,
if you climb out along the branches and look close, where there was a
blossom before, you find now a little green thing something like a knob
(Fig. 2). This tiny knob keeps growing bigger and bigger, and then you
see that it is a baby apple. As the weeks go by, the little apple grows
into a big one; and at last the green begins to fade away, and the red
and yellow to come. One day you find the great grown apple all ripe,
and ready to eat. But I never could see just what made it come like
that, such a big, heavy apple from such a little flower, and I always
wondered about it.”
[Illustration: FIG. 2]
Now, if we wonder about the things we see, we are on the right road.
The child who first “sees” what is happening around him, and then
“wonders” and asks questions, is sure to be good company to other
people and to himself. (And as one spends more time with himself
than with any one else, he is lucky if he finds himself a pleasant
companion.) Such a child has not lost the use of his eyes, as so
many of us seem to have done. And when the little brain is full of
questions, it bids fair to become a big brain, which may answer some
day the questions the world is asking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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