By Steve Batie
Houseworks | Posted: Saturday, June 27, 2009 12:00 am
You start learning plant lore in the sandbox - or perhaps in the alley.
If you're lucky enough to have grown up with an alley.
Take daylilies, which still line the alleys of the city's older neighborhoods - likely because you can't kill the things with an axe.
I thought this probably was a secret only Grandma and I shared until I watched a friend pass it along to one of her little terrorists about 20 years ago.
If you pluck a fresh daylily blossom and hold it to your mouth like a tiny horn, you can suck the nectar from its base, sort of like the way a bee does it - but from the other end.
It doesn't give a kid much of a sugar high, I'll admit.
But it's free, and it doesn't involve begging cookies from the grownups.
Dandelions also figured prominently in childhood plant knowledge - maybe because there were so very many of them in those days before broad-leaf weed control.
It's a mystery to me as an adult, but apparently a kid has to chew a dandelion stem every spring just to be sure it's as bitter as he or she remembers it from last year.
It is, by the way.
I think I was about 8 when I finally decided the plant with the pretty yellow flower was never going to taste as sweet as daylily nectar.
That was also about the time I learned how to twist and knot a "dandylion" ring.
If you held the ring under the chin of the neighbor girl you liked and her chin turned yellow, it meant she liked you back.
Elsewhere in kiddie lore it was said that the yellow chin indicated a love of butter.
(Is it any wonder men still are confused about what women are thinking? Dandelions remain some of our best barometers.)
Morning glories are so named, according to Grandma, because they only open their blossoms on sunny mornings and close them again before the sun gets too hot. This was by way of teaching us to come in out of the sun in the afternoon.
Grandma grew thousands of morning glories on the side of her barn-sized garage, so she should have known.
Same goes for the sunflowers that towered over the tomatoes in Granddad's garden.
A very early bit of horticultural knowledge was that sunflowers magically turn their "faces"toward the sun as it moves across the sky, rather like tiny golden radar antennas.
It would be years before I got into a biology class and learned there was nothing magical about it at all.
Sigh.
Sand burrs, all little boys discover if they're lucky enough to grow up with alleys out back, make great ammunition.
Pick a long stem of nearly ripe burrs and you can fling it at your little brother.
Not only do the burrs sting something awful, they detach from the flinging handle on contact and keep right on stinging until the target can pick them off.
One … by … one.
It's particularly effective if the target's got on a thin and well-worn T-shirt.
He nearly always did.
Send your questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.