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 Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 9:39 am
Gaias looked warily at the little one at his feet. He was her father. He should know what to do, as his father had. He didn't want to be a bad dad but... teaching her about plants? He hardly felt he knew enough himself to be teaching another. They were his passion, his life, outside of his new family, but everything he had learned he had done so himself through trial and tribulation.
Where to even begin?
He looked down into little violet eyes, so much like her mothers, and took a deep breath. "You want to learn about daddy's plants then Hazel? You know you're named after a type of plant, right?".
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Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2010 9:23 am
Hazel had followed her father quietly, and had returned his stare when he looked down at her. Probably returned it a little too intently, as well. She was determined to learn all she could about the plants she liked to spend time with, and that meant paying attention really well. Really well. She wasn't going to miss a word.
"I am? Which one?" Hazel ghosted her gaze over the plants around them, trying to determine which one was hazel. "This one?" She guessed, walking away from her father to stand next to a scrub bush. Her tail wagged slightly. "Do I have flowers?"
No wonder she liked plants! If she was named for one, obviously her parents knew she was meant to have some kind of connection with them. It was just another notch on the board that proved adults knew everything. That was why they always caught pups when they were making trouble.
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Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 2:06 pm
Gaias' relaxed as his daughter brought him to his favourite subject. "No, not that exact one but something very like it. Where Daddy is from it sometimes grows as a tree, too!" he smiled, the worry lines fading and his nurturing instinct coming out - he wanted to help his daughter, all of his children, to grow and flourish like the plants he tended.
"They do have flowers... sortof" he looked off to one side, trying to figure out how to explain the particular oddness of certain plants which had a very different mode of growth - mostly trees, he had noted. "Like wolves, they have boy plants and girl plants - the girl plants have flowers or what look like flowers with little petals and the boy plants have what look like. Uhm. Uh. Well, they have their own type of flower, but it's green or yellowy and doesn't have petals" he finished lamely. Who thought plant biology could be so full of pit traps for the unwary parent?
"If you smell the male flower they make your nose itch, like normal flowers do, but the female ones don't" he added, trying to steer the conversation away from the pit he had begun to dig within it. "I could show you the plant, if you want? It might even have some nuts on at this time of year!" Yes, that was a good idea, introducing to his daughter the fact that plants could be sustenance early.
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Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2010 6:54 am
Hazel looked at the bush in consternation when Gaias told her it wasn't hazel-- she thought she had it right-- but listened to what he had to say with a minimum of disappointment. After all, it was somewhere around here, right? Where else could her plant be? Aves was, after all, the world to a pup as young as her. Even though she had some vague idea that her father wasn't from Aves originally, the idea that there was something outside of her pack wasn't something she could process.
"Nuts?" Hazel tilted one ear in curiously and let her father have the brunt of her attention again, her disappointment gone with the discovery of a new word. "What's that?"
Despite the question, her excited feet trotted back over to him, almost dancing. She wanted to see her plant. "I'd like to see one. Please."
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Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2010 7:06 pm
If Gaias had been of a different slant of mind he might have blushed further - but as it was, he was far too excited about the prospect of teaching someone who actually had some interest in learning. He knew Cora put up with him and that Kalain had a vague interest borne of using plant materials but neither was truly interested in how things grew and how best to make them provide food and the like. He beamed at his daughter, loving the idea of instilling in her the same kind of love for the plant kingdom that he himself had.
Nuts are like seeds, but bigger, with a hard coat - sometimes so hard you can't even bite through them. Hazelnuts are hard, but not so hard you can't break them with your teeth and the little nut inside is tasty. If you don't eat them, they can become the next generation of plants - the plants pups. He smiled goofily, whilst starting to lead her to where they might find said hazel bush.
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Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 5:55 am
One of his steps was several of hers, but Hazel did her best to keep up, trotting at his side as he explained the ways of plants to her. He seemed happy to talk about it, and Hazel was happy to listen to him. But there was apparently only so long the conversation could go on before they had another setback, and one far more noticeable than her dad's weird look earlier.
He was suggesting she eat the nuts.
Hazel looked at her father in horror. "You eat their pups?"
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Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 7:15 am
"Well, uh, it's not like they're really like pups and... and they have hundreds even thousands every year. It's kind of like when we hunt - if we didn't then the prey would overpopulate the world!" this was something Kalain had told him when the shaman had been explaining how Jaitain, the spirit who governed death, came to be. It made a certain sense to him, since he knew that plants growing too closely would not thrive so the same was probably true of animals.
Still, he hadn't really meant for her to make that comparison and it had saddened him a little bit when he ate some of his plants - especially the ones he had raised from seeds. Still, one thing that kept his spirits up on that matter:
"And anyway, I always plant at least one if not more back in a nice place, where it can grow. So many of them only grow a little or not at all without help - I think that might be why plants make so many". He had begun on an ethical question and swung back to information about plants unintentionally...
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Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 8:36 am
"Oh." Hazel fell silent in contemplation of this new information, her limited knowledge trying to make sense of it and filing the information away as part of the thought processes that would build her into an adult. It made sense to make a lot of babies if it was hard for them to grow. She was one of seven, right? Did that mean one or more of them weren't going to grow up?
She looked at her father in a panic and suddenly pushed closer to him, practically ducking under his feet as she walked. If her brothers saw her, she thought at least one of them would be calling her silly. Her parents knew everything, saw everything, and they wouldn't let any of their children be hurt. Besides, they were only seven, and Dad had said that plants made thousands every year. Distracted, she really did drift fully between his paws.
"What's thousands?" She asked from somewhere under him, her mind redirecting itself from its concerns of moments before.
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Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 6:23 am
Gaias had no idea of the worry he'd instilled in his little violet-eyed daughter, had never thought she might even get something like that into her head so when she snuggled close to him he just delighted, yet again, in his daughter. At first he'd been terrified, then gobsmacked, then scared again and then he'd lain beside Cora and her seven beautiful children, his children too, and he'd felt a wash of contentment that he'd not had since he had been at his own mother's belly.
Gaias himself had been an inquisitive youth - but not as directed as Hazel was - she seemed to have a little of her mother in her, there. He had been pretty dozy, really, and his dislike of hunting had earned him no favours from the rest of the pack. It hurt to think of them, that he didn't know if any survived, if any of them were still out there, with pups of their own now or if they were all gone and he was the last of that proud line his parents had started so he pulled his mind away from such heart-sore thoughts and back to the bright beacon of his daughter's inquisitive nature.
"Oh uhm thousands is like..." he cast around for an answer. Explaining many wasn't that hard, he supposed, but to a young pup there were few things which had quite so many parts as to be 'thousands'.
"It's a very big number of things" his jaw cocked in consternation as he tried to think of a particular example. She'd never seen the big migrations, she was too young, she'd never seen snow and it's multitude of flakes, yet. He stared at his feet for a moment before smiling. "Thousands is like the grass - you think of it as one thing but when you look close it is many many single leaves. There are 'thousands' of them or even bigger numbers."
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 3:10 pm
Oh. Well, Hazel knew what grass was. That made sense then. The pup was content to trot under her father's feet, practically tripping him several times while hardly noticing any of the danger to her own little self. It didn't cross her mind to question any further now that she had received an at least half-way satisfactory answer.
"Is that a hazel bush?" She asked, remembering their original reason for moving. They were finding her plant. She hoped that wasn't it. It was kind of scraggly, but she guessed that scraggly bushes needed love too. Even scraggly bushes with almost no leaves. That was kind of sad. The poor bush. Was it sick?
"Is it supposed to look like that?" She asked, moving out from under her father's paws with her eyes still stuck on the scraggly plant. The bush had obviously seen better days, probably before the pines grew so tall that it blocked the majority of the sunlight. Here and there there were still leaves grasping for any chance at survival. "Is it sick?"
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Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2011 3:40 pm
Gaias wasn't elegant at the best of times and was doing his best to avoid stepping on a tiny foot or tail when his daughter's question suddenly brought his attention elsewhere. Stumbling, he only just managed not to end up on his face.
"Hmm... you know, I think it might be" he smiled. He had a good eye for good plants and knew where there were fine hazel specimens so had over-looked this scrubby bush struggling in the shade of the vast conifers. "Sick is probably a good word for it, yes - but it could get better" he said, with a gleam in his eye. This would totally make a great lesson, he thought, and it was the perfect time of year for it, too!
Would you like me to show you how we can make a nice healthy hazel plant from this one?
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Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 8:33 am
"Yes, please," Hazel replied, concerned for her plant. It wasn't the hazel plant's fault it was sick. If her dad could heal it-- and of course he could, he was her dad, that wasn't even a question-- she wanted to help him help it. "Do we have to knock down the trees so it can eat?" Her father had explained that plants ate sunlight, and though that didn't seem like good sustenance to her, Daddy seemed to believe the plants loved it.
She paused and tilted her head at the sickly bush, a thought occurring to her. "Is this a girl plant or a boy plant?" She asked, trying to see the distinctions her father had mentioned. There wasn't a single flower on the plant, with or without petals, so that made it a little hard to tell. Wasn't there any other way to know? "Will we know if it's a girl or boy if we make it better?"
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Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 5:24 pm
Gaias eyed the bush, tilted his head this way and that, thought for a long, drawn out moment and then finally admitted "No, I'm not sure how to tell if it's a girl or a boy plant without the flowers... I've not really concentrated on it, to be honest. Maybe you could study them and see if you can figure out a good way?"
"As for helping it - knocking down whole trees is probably even a bit more than we could do just between us" he winked "but I think we could probably clear some of those scrubby low lying plants around it". He demonstrated, throwing clods of earth back in a spray behind himself as well as the accumulated leaves and weeds.
"We can also take some of it back to my little plot, near the den. Sometimes, if you plant a few sticks, they can grow into whole plants" he grinned. It was something about plants which had always amazed him - even if it didn't work all of the time.
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