plants

Every time I went into town with my mother we would walk past a store with a large (aspidistra) plant in a hideous green pot displayed in their window.

"What an abortion!" My mother would exclaim.

Many years later (and ago) when training to be a nurse, the teaching matron asked us to raise our hand if we knew the meaning of the word 'abortion'. Mine was the only hand up.

I explained it was a big green plant pot. . .

Sylvia

When I was a little girl, I used to spend a lot of time at my paternal grandmother's house. She liked to garden, and I would always play outside as she gardened. Well, one time I was playing by the mailbox and I stepped on a low-lying bush. My grandmother cried, "No! Don't step on Mr. Bush! That hurts him! It makes Mr. Bush say, 'Ouch!'" I had never heard a bush talk before, so I kept walking on it, trying to make it say "Ouch!". It never did.

MaeghanJade

When we were going to visit an Uncle, my Dad would bring rose bushes, peach trees, apple trees, and about anything else he could think of as a gift on each visit. I was proud of my Dad's green thumb and bragged about it at school. I told everyone that my dad even grew toilets, because Dad always told Mom to remember to bring the toilet trees.

A few years later I heard the word toiletries. I never told anyone, until now.

Robert

I was taught in school that plants produced oxygen and took in our carbon dioxide. So I would go around grabbing leaves and would breathe into them deeply and then breathe out really hard, thinking I was getting more air that way, and helping plants grow in the process -.-

Carolina

When I was little, I used to believe that whatever I planted, a tree growing just that would sprout. I planted barbies, crayons, and buttons. And I'd check up on them every so often, always ending up disappointed in myself for the lack of growth and blaming my watering routine.

Megan

Up until I was about 9 years old, I thought that trees grew up from blades of grass that were never mowed for years and years. I thought that forests were made if no one mowed the grass in a certain area for a long time, and that was why there were no forests in cities, just an occasional tree here and there that someone either missed or left for show.

Steven H.

I was convinced that blowing bubbles on flowers helped them grow. Naturally, why not dump an entire bottle of bubbles in the flower bed?

K-dub

i told my little sisters that the big weeds behind our house would eat them if they hurt the weeds. one of the girls stayed up all night with a golf club, waiting for the weed to come get her. the next morning, after no weed shows up, she beat the weed into puree, and threatened to come after me next. ;)

booga

I would always ask my mother what she was doing, even though I could totally see what she was doing. She'd answer me with "Milking a coconut" I thought for years that you got coconut milk by milking them like cows. I always wondered where the udders would have been though.

Meghan

I used to believe that falling leaves were dead butterflies, and I always buried them in the back yeard.

waters

As a kid you see talking plants and trees and animals on cartoons. In Kindergarten I needed to put shiny sparkles on my art paper covered in glue and a teacher pointed me towards a table. I saw a plant on the table and put my picture under the leaves and said "Okay plant, Sparkle!" She was pointing to the dish of sparkles next to the plant. Soon after I also found out that bark on a tree was not a captured dog bark but simply the outside shell. I was becoming really depressed at the fact that plants and trees really don't interact with is very much.

Robert

I used to believe wild flowers were dangerous because they were "wild." I thought the safe flowers were domesticated flowers.

Annon

That eating grass was a sure fire way to gain superhuman powers.

Brendan

My friends and I used to believe that if you planted a rock, it would grow a rock tree.

Anon

When I was little, my older brother and I used to cut weeds with sticks all the time, and this white juice would ooze from the broken stems. One day I cut myself outside playing, and he told me that weed juice would make it heal faster and take the pain away. The placebo worked, and I believed this until I was 11. Before then, I managed to pass the 'secret' on to my friends, who believed it and told their friends, and so on. Who knows where this is now...

Heather Hagen

I used to be scared to climb trees because my parents told me that trees eat people that climb up in them, my parents only told me that so I wouldn't do crazy things and get hurt, but i got scared of trees for a long time!

Lorraine

When I got my glasses at age 4, I was stunned to find: trees were not solid objects of green.....that turned colors in the Fall, and fell to the ground in the shape of leaves. I also was surprised to find: adults did not have solid teeth. I couldn't see the inidividual outlines of the teeth, so I thought as a child, you got them one at a time, but as you grew older.....they must unite into a solid white mass.

Brenda in Iowa

My boyfriend's parents used to amuse themselves by telling him that the rhubarb plants in their garden were triffids (as in 'Day of the Triffids').

They weren't laughing so much when, in terror, he ran them down with his tricycle...

Hen

When I was little I believed that if you wished on a dandelion and blew all the seeds off with one breath your wish would come true. I hopped all around the yard picking dandelion-fuzzy-seeds things and taking a deep breath and wish for a unicorn...consequently our yard had a alot of dandelions the next year and no unicorns were around to eat them

Anon

I remember being fairly certain as a preschooler that since trees were living things, they must poop. I assumed they somehow did it when nobody was looking. When I asked my parents about it, they laughed but would neither confirm nor deny the existence of tree poop.

L