All of my life I have been a certified nature lover.  Perhaps even in the extreme.  As a child, I had mason jars lining my bedroom window sill.  No fancy drapes, no pretty curtains – bare windows with a row of mason jars.  The mason jars meant so much to me that my father placed two glass shelves across the front of the window higher up so I could have two more rows of jars.

Each jar held 2 folded paper towels that were well saturated and liberally sprinkled with seed of some sort.  More often than not, the seed had been soaked quite thoroughly for a day or so before landing on its soft new home.  In my bedroom window I grew nearly every vegetable  known to man (well at least what was known in our 1 acre vegetable garden).  I waited and watched the seeds as they would germinate and sprout and used them to predict when things would be happening in the garden.  I drew illustrations of them, took pictures of them with my little Argus Instamatic camera with the handy drop in film cartridge.  I took hundreds of black and white photos of my plants, and my father and I would develop the film in his darkroom and make a few sample prints of things that looked interesting.  (That was clearly when my love for taking photos of plants was birthed.)

Once the plants in the garden would sprout, it was time for me to take the first spouts from my jars and dissect them.  I spent untold Saturday afternoons dissecting seedlings, viewing them through a microscope and drawing them.  One of my older brothers had been given dissecting tools and a “science set” for Christmas some years earlier and when he had out-grown his interest in those things he ‘gifted” the tools to me.

Of course I did not dissect all the plants that I spouted.  I let the beans grow long and was able to keep them growing with water and plant food in the jar.  I grew sunflowers in jars, and corn – one year I grew a corn stalk 8 feet tall.  When the plants got too tall for my window sill, I was allowed to place them in the window in the hallway.  My mother would tack white cotton cord to the walls around them to keep them standing upright.

She never complained about my “weird” experiments, she just helped them along even though they were often unsightly and could begin to smell bad if I didn’t take good care of the jars.

I haven’t really thought about this a lot, other than as fond memories,  but in retrospect I can see the profound influence it has had on my life and the things that interest me – or don’t interest me.

Years later it sent me on a two year journey of attending a junior college to study plant science, botany, agriculture, weed science, soil science, water conservation, biology 1 & 2, Chemistry 1 & 2 , environmental design, landscape design, plant tissue culture, and ornamental horticulture, etc., eighteen units a semester for four semesters.

I think perhaps I need to go back to school soon.