I’m feeling inspired today. Also, relaxed, grateful, thoughtful. Today feels like a good day to recall warm memories from the past and let them inspire thoughts, reflections, and actions for today.
So I am going to participate in my first blog challenge. I was reading Cee’s Photography blog. Her post today was Travel Theme: Forest. So I am going to jump right in and join the party.
My mom was a real plant enthusiast and she passed on this love of plants (and their names and traits) to me. One of her favorites was the mystical Trillium flower that grows in redwood forests. The flower has three petals, three little leaves supporting the petals, and three large primary leaves on the single stem. It is a symbol of magic and here is why: Trilliums bloom once a year, from the same plant, and they can live for around 15 years. When the flower is spent, the entire plant disappears, only to reappear and bloom again the next year from the same root. For this reason, we should never pick them, that could kill the whole plant. I always get a special thrill each Spring when they grow up among the needles and redwood sorrel on the forest floor. They always remind me of my mom. And I’ve happily taught my own two boys how precious and delicate they are, and the magic that they represent.
This is Sequoia Park redwood forest. It is one of the closest places to us to walk in the forest and our family has spent many, many hours there. It is a special forest sanctuary right in our town. In the Spring, magical Trillium flowers grow there.
This blog challenge is hosted by Where’s my backpack? (Great blog name – love it!) I recommend you check it out and maybe write a Travel Theme: Forest of your own. If you do, feel free to leave a link in the comments section below.
Highly inspired,
the Honking Goose
When we were kids we used to call these Stinking Benjamins. I have no idea why.
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I’ve never heard that before, so I looked it up. On the Adirondack Almanac, I found this: “Ah, but Stinking Benjamin – surely that is a name behind which a good tale lies. Sadly, no. It turns out that it, like so many words in our language today, is a corruption of something else, in this case the word benzoin, which itself was a corruption of the earlier word benjoin, an ingredient derived from plants from Sumatra and used in the manufacture of perfume. Our trillium, however, does not smell sweet or spicy, hence the tag “stinking.””
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Thank you, now I know. No matter my age, I can learn something new everyday!
; )
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Always 😀
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I loved learning that! Cool!
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I’m so glad 😁
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Trilliums are one of my favorites and really do hold their own type of magic. Where I live they blanket all around us each spring and I can’t help but stop and wander through them.
As a side note those trees look amazing!
I may have to try this theme tomorrow. It makes me want to dig through the past a bit!
Thanks!
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Hmm, I didn’t realize they grew other places that aren’t in the redwoods, how interesting – and lovely!
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I love the woods, although the trees I wander through daily aren’t nearly so tall! And I love the Trillium — a beautiful flower that reminds me of edelweiss, the elusive Swiss flower (which never showed up anywhere I was in Switzerland in my 5 years there).
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I looked up edelweiss – very pretty.
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And very elusive.
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Trillium was one of the first things I learned about after moving here and it remains a favorite of ours. We named one of our sweet basset hounds Trillium and I wish she could grow again.
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Oh, that is beautiful, thank you for sharing that.
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