Do you have a favourite plant from your childhood years ?

My favorite plant from my childhood years was and still is thrift. Where I lived in Rutland (UK) there were big cushions of it at the front of the house and I remember the cats going to sleep on it. I have tried growing it here in my garden but with out much success...but I still keep buying small plants hoping that they will one day look as nice as those that were in Rutland...many many years ago.

It has to be pansy for me - I remember both grandparents having them despite living socially miles apart (one set having a farm and the other in a council flat with balcony) and mum let me grow some as a child. I always have them now.

My favourite memories are the old fashioned brown wallflowers that smell so lovely, bluebells, and nasturtiums, because I was allowed to pick as many as i wanted, to decorate my architectural efforts in the sandpile. (It wasn't a sandpit, just a bagful tipped out onto the back path By the house wall, and I loved it!)

Rogi, I always wanted to see thrift growing wild on the sea cliffs, and now I live in a place where the whole cliff path area is pink with it for miles! Have you tried it on a rockery? It seems to do well on poor dry soils.

On my walk to primary school, I used to pass a bush with the most wonderful scent. Not having any knowledge whatsoever of what it was, it took most of my adult life to discover it again to be a Philadelphus, the single old-fashioned variety. Now I have it in the garden ( after many attempts to get the one with 'that' scent) and whenever I smell it I am immediately taken back to childhood. Happy days!

When I was VERY little (about a century or so ago) we lived with my grandparents, and my Granddad had box bushes, and I used to be fascinated by the way the ends of my very small fingers fitted so neatly into the concave leaves. Then, the perfume of a big lilac tree by the back door of our first home (a little Bristol post-war prefab) enchanted me: I used to climb up and bury my face in the blossom. I have only to smell lilac, and I'm back there and five years old again. Then the first seeds I ever planted, when I was about 6, were orange Californian poppies, and I have, 60 years on, got a packet of seeds to plant this year. I shall be re-living my childhood all over again, since I shall now have all three favourites growing in my own garden for the first time.
Oh yes, and my other Grandparents, who we visited in West Hartlepool every Christmas, always had a Christmas cherry in a Clarice Cliff pot on the windowsill next to the tree, and for the first time this year, we have had one too. (Not sure whatever happened to that CC pot, though)

I like box hedges too. They always look so neat.
There are two plants that are favs for me, from my childhood

1. Lupin - As a little boy I used to drink the rain water that collects in the centre of the leaves lol. It was nice and fresh :o)

2. Sanguisorba - there was one growing by my father's shed, but it died many years ago when I was little. I never saw it again, and I didn't even know what it was called . After I got a computer I joined GoY to see if I could find out what it was called. I gave a description, and was told it was Sanguisorba. So I sent away for one, and now I can see it again in my own garden after all these years :o)

The smell of English marigolds , the juice of them after "dead-heading ", takes me right back to when we moved into a new house and we had a big garden for the first time .

Lily of the Valley. They seemed to be everywhere when I was a child and I loved their wonderful scent. I have hardly any in my own garden.

Antirrhinum - Snapdragon I remember them form primary school days and a ovely sunny childhood

For me it has got to be busy Lizzie, it grew like weeds, as a little girl I used to crush the stems to get a liquid out of it to use as oil when pretending to cook during play.

I remember wandering around the garden talking to the flowers when I was small (I'm more selective in my choice of conversational companions now!!), looking up at the huge Hollyhocks and telling them that I was going to be as big as them one day! They stood regally in front of a fence smothered in the Dorothy Perkins rose which I thought might be covering a gateway to somewhere secret! (Obviously had too much time on my own!) Then I used to love the California Poppies - Escholzia? I used to like 'helping' them to shed their green cone-shaped caps so the flowers could blossom. The Phlox always fascinated me, and they grew next to sweet-smelling Stocks - "Phlox and Stocks" used to be my little 'poem' until I found something else in the garden to interfere with. ;o)

We used to have a trellis covered in Dorothy Perkins, Nariz, - beautiful! You don't see them much these days - I think they are too prone to disease.
This blog has opened up so many plant memories - some of the wild flowers I remember are the great tall swathes of evening primrose on the sand-dunes at Brean, near Bristol, in the days when that was all that was there, tiny mauve and yellow toadflax growing in the walls, hedges full of Lady's bedstraw, wild honeysuckle and roses and ragged robin. Now we have moved out to the (foreign) countryside, I am re-discovering so many of my childhood favourites that I haven't seen in 50 years, it gets quite emotional.

oh what a wonderful question and so many childhood favs.:

virginia stock- the first seeds i grew.
nasturiums as they 'bite your tongue' the peppery after taste of the leaves.
being brave when putting my fingers inside a snap draggon flower [4yrs old I think]
using scarlet pimpernel to forecast the weather growing on the promenade by the sand.
snowdrops the first sign of coming spring.
lilac in the back garden and watching blackbirds build a nest and have 4 babies [6yrs old]

apart from the scarlet pimpernel I still grow all of these.

I am so glad I did this, and am printing up all the comments. They have brought back so many happy memories for us all. I think now I must have been 3 when my mother told me the Shrub was Box, because I cant remember her telling me.
I was very fortunate, in that my mother was a keen gardener.
Never remember learning all the plants from books, so she must have told me.
I was thinking today. Little children who are 3 have very receptive brains. If every parent and grandparent told them the names of plants, as they play in the garden, and go on walks in the park, they would remember.
Thats a way of 'sowing seeds' for their future lives, and an interest in the peaceful science of gardening.

I realise that was how my Dad 'sowed seeds' in my memory as, sometimes when I'm looking at a plant or flower, the name pops into my mind despite never having knowingly researched it. Well done, Dad!

Ah..my childhood favourite garden plant was Honesty. I saw some growing in a hedge this summer, I will have a walk with the dog later just to see if there is a seed head left to peel and reveal that shiny mother of pearl papery moon.

Oh Nariz, that brings back memories - when I was very small I used to "visit" next door, and was allowed to pull the "nightcaps" off the Californian poppies too. I never grew them myself until about three years ago and now they pop up every year. I still take the nightcaps off! Second childhood or what?

my girls believed they were pixie hats Steragram. OH did some clever photoshop images of pixies and Fairies next to the flowers. They helped set up the camera in the garden and we 'left' the camera there overnight to see if they triggered the camera like wild animals do.

It was years before they twigged. Tooth fairy the same thing. arnt we naughty, but they still talk about it with fondness.

why dont children mind some of these lies?

It's nice to have a bit of "magic" in our lives, even if we don't quite believe it. Maybe it's as Steragram says - an attempt to stretch our childhood out a bit.