Flower Folklore

Dear O'H dear and Lovely Tea Jenny,

I saw lots of dandelion clocks today which always makes me want to pick one and blow on it.

I distinctly remember being a Mini Princess and being told that you could tell the time with a dandelion. You could count the number of puffs it took to blow the seeds off and that was the time. Four puffs, four o’clock. You get the picture. I also distinctly remember knowing, even as a small child, that this was b0llocks* and that obviously dandelions couldn’t tell the time otherwise everyone would be wearing them on their wrists.

The same scepticism was applied to buttercups. It made no sense to me that if someone held a buttercup under my chin and there was a yellow glow, then I must love butter. I HATED butter as a child and no flower was going to convince me otherwise.

It was, however, trickier with the daisy game of ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. There was a genuine feeling of dread in case the last petal was ‘he loves me’. This was perfectly understandable as boys were HORRID and SMELLY and that would be DISGUSTING. In order to add additional danger to this game, my friends and I would nominate actual real life horrid smelly boys for each other and swear that the outcome of this flower dismemberment was definitely TRUE. The humiliation of having to say ‘he loves me’ about Ben, who only removed his finger from his nose long enough to eat the bogies, was almost too much to bear. It was like the child version of Russian Roulette.

I might pick a daisy tomorrow. The Prince will have a lot of explaining to do if the game ends badly!

C

*or the equivalent age appropriate description