Mountain laurel
Posted by Cathy and Shiloh on 1/10/2022, 2:02 pm
I'm lucky I made it through childhood alive, geez. I grew up on a small mountain at the foot of a big mountain and every May the forest bloomed with tons of mountain laurel bushes. I'm reading a novel and I just found out that mountain laurel is toxic to people and animals if you ingest it. The leaves, the flowers, the shoots, the nectar. I don't remember any adult telling us kids to be careful. I have a vague memory of picking some blooms to put in a vase but I was never interested in eating flowers. Good thing! I do remember loads of huckleberry bushes blooming in the summer, picking the berries and eating them; a small berry planet with berries that we called dogberries in the fall; and a branch from a tree (I have no idea what kind) that if you chewed on it tasted like spearmint. Our next door neighbor had an orchard with peach, pear and apple trees and she would bring us the fruits when they ripened and she also had a nut tree called a butternut tree by the side of the road. We would collect the nuts and smash them open with rocks. Cathy and Shiloh
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