In all places then and in all seasons,

Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings,

Teaching us by most persuasive reasons,

How akin they are to human things.

- Longfellow

The above passage, which was quoted in The Handbook of Nature Study, gave such inspiration to me when I read it.  I know this week's Green Hour Challenge was to begin focus on garden flowers, and I'll get to that too, but if I may, I'd like to take a small detour first.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been spending much time exploring in our backyard and around the edge of the woods and finding and identifying wildflowers.  This was a new nature subject area for us, something we'd never taken such careful notice of.  But with the onset of spring, and with new eyes, my children and I have been seeing them emerging and bursting forth as if carrying a message of hope from their Creator for a new season.

Wild Blue Phlox - Backyard by Creek

"The only right way to begin plant study with young children is through awakening their interest in and love for flowers."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 453

Being in nature continues to provide beautiful moments for my children and I.  Even this evening, my son with wide-eyes and excitement, came carrying a newly found wildflower for us to observe and attempt identification. "Quick Mom, it's a new wildflower, do you know it's name?" he asked.

"The points to be borne in mind are that children like to call things by their names because they are real names, and they also like to use "grownup" names for things; but they do not like to commit to memory names which to them are meaningless."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 456

I believe that if I had just handed my children a list of wildflowers with their photos and names and asked them to carve them into memory, I would have surely been disappointed with their lack of interest and their lack of abilities to remember any of them.

But by learning them one by one "on the hunt", smelling and feeling the petals, observing their beauty, using our guides to identify them, and collecting some of them for pressing, my children can tell you the names of each of the 7 so far that we have identified without any help from me.  And I wasn't even attempting for them to memorize them!  Just the other night, driving home, my daughter excitedly piped out "Mom, look at all that beautiful Field Mustard, the whole huge field is yellow!"  Yes, she remembered and she noticed!

Field Mustard - Backyard by Creek

To see more of our wildflower photos click Nature Photos ~ Spring's Beauty.

Ok, back to our main focus for this week's Green Hour Challenge.  When I think of garden flowers, I'm immediately transported in my mind to my parent's house.  So that's exactly where we took our garden flowers outside time of observing.  I jokingly call my parents "The King and Queen of Flowers"!  They have a simply beautiful property full of dozens of different kinds of garden flowers.  I think both of my parents were born with green thumbs.  We took over 50 photos!  But I'll only share a handful here!  Here are some of the beautiful flowers we observed:

"...every child should feel that every seed planted is a living thing and that it is struggling to grow..."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 455

Bleeding Hearts

 Iris

Tulips (they have multiple varieties of these, but only a few have their blooms still)

Blue Forget-Me-Nots

Some type of special tulip (I can't remember the name right now which seems quite funny that the last flower was a forget-me-not! lol)

Blue Phlox

And my personal favorite garden flower!:

Lily of the Valley - Could there be any sweeter smell in the world!

See the tiny bells?!

Here are some other things we observed:

My parent's beautiful walkway with arbor

Purple Martin House - they were flying all overhead but wouldn't stay still enough for a photo! My Dad was talking to us about how social of a bird they are.  They would swoop down almost like they wanted to land on us.

 My Dad's Barlett Pear tree, this is one of many fruit trees he raises.  For all my childhood I remember my Dad's love of growing fruit trees.  I remember camping out under the starlight in the middle of his mini orchards!

 See the tiny pears forming?

More wildflowers we found there.  We've identified the yellow as some type of wild strawberry, we were unable to identify the purple one yet.

For our challenge we were to pick a flower to focus on.  Today, on the school agenda we will look at all our photos and pick a flower, read a small bit from the Handbook and observe more closely the photos we took and then make a journal entry as well.

Also this last week, we built and planted our raised garden beds, you can read about our experience  with that at Gardening ~ Raised Beds and Perennials.  And finally, Hannah started some perennial seeds indoors and we are anxiously awaiting being able to plant them outdoors!  They are doing quite well.  Almost all of them have sprouted.

Thank you for joining me for my Green Hour Challenge!  Please inspire yourself and your children by joining in on the nature adventures with Barb at Handbook of Nature Study.