My grandparents had a pond in their backyard and I used to spend a lot of time by it studying the plants and wildlife. There was one plant that I discovered when you peeled its stem inside it looked like the fruit of a banana. It was small so I thought they were 'fish bananas.' I would peel them and break up the 'fish bananas' and throw them in the pond to feed the fish. I told my family, but they never corrected me...I guess they thought it was cute. I have no idea what that plant was.

Christiecat

When my brother was a little, he touched once a nettle. He started to cry, of course, and he said: "Mom, a grass bite me!"

Gabriela

Living in a rural village as a small child, on our walk to school there were lots of flowers and plants, but I was particularly fascinated by the thistles. My mum (bless her - as a joke) informed me that they were hedgehog eggs not thinking that I would actually believe her......

Gemsy Wemsy

I used to think that the giant sprinklers in farmers feilds "made" strawberries...not sure how that would work, but I was convinced of it!

starfiin

when i was about 7 i read a book about these people who walked through a rhodedendren bushes (sorry if thats spelt wrong!!) and never came back out again because they found a different world in there. For years i was terrified of rhodedendren bushes thinking that i would be sucked into them and forced to live in another world!! i would like to meet the person who wrote that book!!

phoebe

When my daughter was in kindergarten, one of her little classmates pointed out the berries on a juniper bush and informed us, "Those are caterpillar eggs."

Annie's mom

When I was little, I though that some cactuses were soft because of the white fuzzy effect made by the many spines on the plant, I believed this until one day I decided to pet it.

Melancholy Otter

I used to believe that when me and my friends used to go hop-picking (the stuff you make beer out of) every september when we was little, we would dare each other to go sixteen steps down the row.
But no-one ever did sixteen, because legend has it, that the hop ghost would get you when you reached sixteen steps and you would never come back

That legend has gone on for centeries (sp?) and no-one is brave enough to do sixteen.

Rennie-woo's gramma (Sixteen-steps-to-hop-hop-hop)

My sisters told me that spaghetti grew on trees. The also showed me a picture from the encyclopedia of a "matchbook tree." They explained that the small, fruit-like objects (which were really plums)were picked and each was individually whittled down to make a perfect little red match.

Jayme

We used to drive by wheat fields on road trips...except that I thought it was all pasta...spaghetti noodles to be specific.

Joan Wyatt

I used to believe that every seed would grow where ever it was planted. One day I swallowed a dandelion seed and for months I was waiting until it came sprouting out of my mouth, which then I thought it would kill me because I also believed that the white stuff inside dandelions was poison. So I waited for months and months for my "death" which I knew was going to come. I lived with this fear for about a year until I realized that the dandelion seed wouldn" grow in my stomach.

T.L.C.

I always thought that pineapples grew on trees, untill i saw a pineapple field in a movie when i was 15. I jus couldn't bleave they grew in the ground.

Nate

My mother used to prevent me from eating types of berries that were inedible to humans by telling me that they were "bird-berries, not people-berries." I beleived until the age of fifteen that "bird-berry" was the proper name of the plant.

Anon

When I was younger I either heard someone say or saw on tv that if you speak to plants it's good for them. So when I would walk home from school I would stop in front of my house and talk to our tree(mind you, the tree was probably done growing). I would tell him he was the best tree on the street and that he had the greenest leaves. When fall would come around and the trees would start to lose their leaves, I would root him on. I'd tell him he was the strongest and toughest tree, and not to give up his leaves yet. Like it was some sort of contest. Lucky for me it was a healthy tree or I would have had a lot more disappointment in my childhood. As a red sox fan, I think I'd had enough(until last year!)

conor

When I was younger, we were traveling to visit my grandmother. I saw some low hanging clouds and asked my mother "What's that?" She thought I was looking at the rice fields so she said "Rice." From that day on, I thought rice came from low hanging clouds. I used to wonder how they got the rice in bags when it would fall so freely from the sky. Well, I believed that through all my geography classes and when teachers said rice was grown in fields, I would just say to myself, "Humph, yeah, right. I know it comes from clouds." I thought that for a LONG, LONG time...I dare not say when I learned differently.

Jazi

unfortunately, i have no idea whether this is a lie or not... but my mother told me that if i picked dandelions i would wet the bed! (of course, i've never dared to try!)

tony ruscoe

My Granada once gave me a swans feather and told me if I planted it in the garden it would grow into a swan tree. I did and was very disappointed when nothing happened.

Lauren

When I was little my sister and I, and everyone we hung around with, believed that common sumac (the kind with the big red conelike flowers) was something horribly deadly called "Poison Sycamoe." If you touched it, you would die. Imagine my surprise when I read in a nature book that you could brew the red flowers into a lemony flavored tea!

Anon

My son, Matthew was convinced that the machine we used for cutting his nanny's grass was called a "LAWN LOWER"- and who's to say he was wrong!

Chris Wilson

when i was about 7 or 8 years old, i accidentally swallowed the seed of a calamansi fruit (really really small round version of the lime fruit, except a notch sweeter). i told my guardian about it and she said that i have to get it out of my body immediately because a calamansi plant will grow inside my body overnight. it took my mom about a couple of hours or so to reassure little ol' me that that wasn't gonna happen.

nix