Love of plants

[maddie]

Where did you get your love of plants from?
I got mine from my father, he was so crazy about plants. Also he was worried about was his garden, the rest were secondary. Not that he didn't care for us or our home.. but he was so fond of his garden.
I think this caught on to me and a couple of my brothers.. we have plants allover our house though we live in medium sized apartments.
How did you get you love for plants?

 

[claudine]

My boyfriend bought me my first miniature rose almost three years ago and this is when I fell in love with gardening. I had had some plants before but I was never really interested in them. My father doesn't like plants and my mother was never willing to teach me about it, so I hadn't discovered how wonderful it is to take care of a plant until I became an adult.

 

[taskeinc]

My love for plants sort of occurred accidentally because when I first tried, on my own, the couple plants I had, did not survive. I was actually about to give up on plants until an ex-co-worker shared a piece of her philodendron with me. Twenty years later, horticulture is one of my favorite hobbies, pretty much neck-in-neck with star-gazing, learning about stars and the amazing universe.

 

[Pat]

I don't really know, I started a garden when I was in elementary school and feel in love. I like watching the plants grow from little seeds to their maturity.

 

[maddie]

@ taskeinc, most people give up when their first experiment goes wrong. Goof that you grew that philodendron. At this moment I have one piece of a philodendron in water and it has just started growing new leaves. This is one easy plant to start with.
@ Pat, I love to watch seeds grow into plants too.. that is why I generally go for seeds than seedling when it comes to gardening. That is more fun to see a miracle take place in front of your eyes.

 

[Jameela280]

There was a time that I did not like plants because I felt like they did not last long and were too much work. I have come to appreciate fresh flowers and plants and the dirt can be therapeutic to the mind. After planting you just look and appreciate what you have nurtured.

 

[GardenElixir]

My love for plants and for nature in general has simply always been inherent within my own nature. Most of my family do not seem to be as interested in nature or gardening as I do, so I guess this is one of my own personal passions.

 

[ACSAPA]

I naturally have always loved plants and animals. I didn't start actually owning plants until I got my first grown up apartment, but I've always been a nature lover.

 

[Gina145]

I'm not really sure where my love of plants came from. We always had the odd plant inside the house when I was growing up, but most of them didn't survive very long.My family always hired someone to take care of the garden as the only serious gardener in the family was my late grandfather, and he lived a thousand miles away. As I didn't see him very often I don't think I got it from him.

I think my interest in bonsai trees just came from looking at them and wishing I could have one, but for years I was scared to try because I didn't think I'd be able to keep one alive. And my oldest African violet was bought in 2002 to use for a photo challenge. Somehow it survived despite my ignorance.

 

[TheCrazyPlantLady]

Both my parents grew up on farms, so even though we lived in the city we always had a kitchen garden. My Mom had some flower beds, which never really interested me, but I loved the raw vegetables straight out of the garden! However, my grandmother had the most amazing (to me) house with a sun room built on the back door, that she used to over winter and propagate plants. She had the most beautiful old-fashioned flowers in her garden - geraniums, marigolds, bleeding heart, tiger lily, poppy - and she would collect the seeds in the fall on the ones like the poppy and the marigolds, take cuttings of the geraniums. I would spend hours in the sunroom playing, and the flowers she grew are my favorite garden plants, and ones I always have in my garden. I inherited her seeds, and was able to grow marigolds and poppies from them for years, but too much moving around and not storing them correctly and I think the remaining ones are toast.

 

[Gina145]

Your grandmother's sun room sounds like heaven. I dream of having a place like that, but for now I've had to content myself with a small polycarbonate greenhouse I assembled from a kit. I can walk inside, but it's so full there's hardly room for me to move. Last summer I got caught inside it during a heavy hailstorm and it was impossible to find a spot where I could keep properly dry.

 

[TheCrazyPlantLady]

It really was. It helped that I was a kid - I'm sure it wouldn't have seemed quite so spacious as an adult!

I would love to have a greenhouse. Or a sunroom. I'd really like to screen in our deck, which would also give it a bit of shade. Right now it's too hot during the day and too buggy by night to go out there. But the sunshine loving plants think it's just right!

Too bad you didn't have an umbrella plant in there - you could have used it to stay dry!

 

[happyflowerlady]

When I was a child, my mother was the family gardener, and she mainly grew flowers, but we also had a lot of fruit trees and berry bushes. Our house was on a large lot, so we had apple, pear, and cherries growing, and mom also raised raspberry and blackberries , and there was a big old grapevine out back, and a rhubarb patch as well.
We didn't have any vegetables, but we almost always had fruit all summer long.
And the flowers were everywhere.... Lilac bushes, roses, peonies, and all around the sides of the house were day lilies, and other spreading flowers.
I didn't really start to have an interest in my own garden until I was an adult, and had children of my own, and wanted to grow fresh vegetables for us to eat.

 

[Gina145]

You were lucky to have all those fruit trees. We have two wonderful peach trees when I was a child, but for some reason they both died years ago. A few years ago we bought a very young peach tree, but it's really not doing well at all.

There was also a tiny plum tree which was about the same height as me when I was about five years old. It eventually grew enormous. That tree is still alive though its fruit production seems to have dropped off the last few years, probably because of bad pruning.

I'd love to have a cherry tree. I've grown a little one from seed which I plan to turn into bonsai in a year or two when the trunk is thick enough. I wish it would get fruit, but I don't know if that's likely to happen any time soon.

 

[firelily99]

Probably from my dad and mom as well as my grandparents. Dad always was working in the yard, his greatest loves were tomatoes and roses. My mom always had houseplants and her African violets were gorgeous. My grand parents on both sides had been farmers for many years and it was a treat to go and visit and run around in the fields and giant gardens.