plants

I used to believe that marigolds would spit at you if you walked by them because my mother told me that they were in her garden to keep away bugs. You had to take a walkway through her garden in order to get to our driveway and every summer I would run as fast as I could past the marigolds and jump into the car or into the house. My mother didn't find out why until I was 18 years old. :)

Emily Anne

I used to believe that wild flowers were really "wild". I was terrified at the thought of going into the countryside incase I was attacked by any "wild" flowers.

Peter Sanders

I used to believe that Rhododendron was a dinosaur.

Victor

When i was younger my dad used to take me and my brother mushroom catching.

We had to leave at about 6 in the morning so that the mushrooms would still be asleep. We had to creep up the field slowly and throw our coats over them before they ran away.

gullible git

When I was 3, my brother told me there was a new kind of bee that looked just like dandelion seeds. It was late summer, and I had never experienced quite that level of terror before.

Matt Dukes

My grandfather and I planted a tree. It was only a few inches high, and he told me that if I were to jump over it every day, that I would always be able to jump over it. The important part was to NEVER miss a day, or the whole cause would be lost. Not only did I believe- but I actually jump over it every day for several months!

Anon

Someone once told me that mother nature was the Earth. I jumbled this up somehow and got to thinking that mother nature was kind of like santa claus, only she would watch you when you were out in nature and would punish you if you damaged anything. I was terrified to go running in gym class, but would never explain to my teacher why i HAD to run on the mulch.

The worst story, however, was in the woods on a class field trip. I tripped and snapped a branch off of a tree. I was badly scraped up, but wouldn't stop screaming about how "mother's going to kill me now"

britishbroccoli

My childhood best friend confessed several years ago that she had never realized as a kid that sticks came from trees. She thought they were just something you find on the ground, like rocks.

SBS in NJ

I used to believe flowers were alive and had feelings. So when I was about 3 or 4 I would sit in the garden and talk to the periwinkles. I would just chat with them to make them think I was their friend and when they were lulled into a false sense of security I would eat them

winke

My Grandmother had an ornamental chilli plant, with lots of small brightly coloured chillies on it. I was convinced that it was a jelly bean tree and thought she was lying to me because she didn't want me to eat them all. Suffice to say I learnt the hard way.

H.B.

When I was little I thought that reincarnation meant that you turned into a walking and talking carnation if you weren't succesfull in life.

Rachel D.

My mum had a rubber plant and she used to steal rubbers from her work and put them on the plant each month and told me that it actually used to grow the rubbers and thats where all the rubbers in the world came from!

Laura

I used to think insects would walk along tree branches and *poof* become a leaf. I misunderstood buds for bugs.

Lisa

When I was 4 my granparents and I drove from South Carolina to Disney World in Orlando, Fl. Along the way they kept telling me about the vast fields of amazing orange trees in Florida. When we got to Florida we drove through these vast fields, but when I looked the trees were not orange...they were the same color as regular trees...they just had oranges on them. I couldn't believe it. My grandparents were surprised by my dissappointment...and quite amused. I still wish there were "orange" trees.

Charley

For some reason - and I have no idea why - when I was very young (probably about 3-4 years old) I thought that the sticks that fell during a rainstorm that were still wet would bite you if you touched them. If they were dry, everything was fine, but if they were wet, they'd bite you. Further, this applied only to small sticks, not to branches or limbs, but sticks of the specific length of maybe 2-7 inches. Anything larger or smaller was deemed, for some reason, harmless. So I would get my yellow rainslicker on, take a plastic cup, and go around cautiously collecting these biting sticks, ultimately putting them either in the trash where they couldn't hurt anyone or in the garage to dry them out enough that they were once again safe for public use. Then, for some reason, I stopped thinking about it altogether, without any consideration as to whether or not what I'd been thinking had been correct or not.

Jake S.

I remember hearing a series of newscasts about a dangerous power plant, some trouble with a power plant, and I thought that it was a big green angry plant (you know, the kind of plant that grows in soil) and that it was throwing a tantrum of some sort and everyone was afraid of this powerful angry plant. I can still see the image I had in my mind of this big plant thrashing its leaves, with people running in fear or else trying desperately to placate it.

Alison

Trees grew leaves as camouflage so birds would`nd nest in them. Don`t ask.

DaWind

my mom and babysitter used to bring me outside to show me the pussywillows thinking i'd like them. well, i thought they were poisonous caterpillers growing out of the trees. they wanted me to pet the little fizzy things but i would cry and scream because i thought they were going to bite me and crawl on me and kill me and pee on me. eventually i learned they're not poisonous caterpillers tring to kill me and pee on me.

special

I was convinced by my older cousin that if I put moss in the letterbox then when you had enough the mailman paid you $10.00 We were 8 and 6 at the time.
Needless to say my mum always wanted to know why some idiot kept putting moss in the letterbox.

Jen

Me and my mates used to believe that you could make perfume by cramming rose petals into jars of malt vinegar and washing up liquid.

We would go out on night time petal-raids of all the rose bushes in the estate. Residents would wake up to a forest of balding shrubs in their front gardens. Putting them into a washing up bowl we would then mash up the fragrant mixture with lashings of sarsons and fairy liquid. If we were feeling particularly adventurous we would do it 'wine making' style and get our bare feet in on the action. We would then wash out all my mums jam jars - anything that was just over half empty would do - and ladle the fragrant mash into the jars, where it would lay forgotten and festering until the next summer. We even designed labels and talked to our school teacher about having a stall in the school fete.

mike