In my last article I wrote about animal life in the summer; another interesting subject is plants in the Yukon.
The most popular plants are FLOWERS. Flowers give colour and beautiful fragrances for everybody to enjoy.
Flowers help out, too.
They give pollen and nectar that bees make honey with, both for themselves and my little sisters, who eat bread with peanut butter and honey every day for breakfast.
Flowers are also nice for little kids (and yes, sometimes 12-year-olds) to pick for their mothers, and for mothers to put in their second-best vases.
One of the things that I like about flowers is that there is such a big variety of them so you can chose which kind you like most. Dandelions are the favourites of the three smaller kids in my family. My other younger sister is 10 and likes roses and forget–me-nots.
My favourite flower is the wild rose, which blooms just around my birthday. My Mom always takes the rose petals and dries them for tea. They also taste great in salads.
Boys aren’t too interested in flowers, they like mushrooms more — at least my younger brother does. My brother’s favourite mushroom is one that he calls the “fire mushroom.” He calls it that because when you hit it with a stick, red dust comes out.
The most annoying plants are weeds!
It is impossible to grow a garden and never pull out a single weed. Weeds can be almost as beautiful as flowers sometimes, but no matter how beautiful they look on roadsides, they almost never look beautiful in gardens, especially when you have to help weed your mother’s huge garden.
The last and most useful plants are trees and bushes.
Bushes give berries for dessert and trees give green colours and nice shady spots on a hot summer day. Trees give fruit too, but there aren’t many fruit trees in the Yukon.
Plants also give us oxygen and clean the air. Plants are also the bottom of the food chain, so without plants there wouldn’t be any food for plant-eating animals, and without plant-eating animals, there wouldn’t be any food for meat-eating animals, so there wouldn’t be any animals without plants.
Without plants there wouldn’t be any air or animals. So let’s not take plants for granted; I for one am thankful that there are such wonderful things like plants in the Yukon.
