Up until the age of eight I was a pupil at a village school, and one of my memories whilst there is that we quite frequently went for nature walks. I recall sitting in a fresh green field and making daisy chains with some of the other children. The way they did them was quite different to the way my mother had taught me. They would make a little slit at the bottom of a stalk and then push another daisy up to its head through that, then make a hole in its stalk, and so on. I used to plait mine so that the flowers were close together and the resultant 'rope' rather than 'chain' was far less fragile than those of my fellow classmates. Each type has its own beauty, though.
Those nature walks are a pleasure to remember - sunny days during which we learnt the names of flowers - daisy, buttercup, bluebell, celedine, dandylion, poppy and many more; walking by the river learning about whirpools and waterfalls; going to a farmyard and seeing the fearsome bull making enough noise to scare me half to death; going to the woods to paint bluebells in the spring. How much more interesting and pleasureable that was than it must be for children today, watching it all on TV.