by Hope Vanderberg

In plants, the course of individual development is greatly influenced by signals received from the external environment, mediated by hormones...

Primary plant body: includes the young, soft shoots and roots...

"Where do flowers get their names?" the smallest girl asked me, and I saw curiosity rise and bloom in her eyes. "How fast does a flower grow?" As fast as your mind unfolds its questions, child, like petals new and wet. I don't tell her the answers I have found, because I don't want to snuff out that spark so soon. Where do flowers get their names? From a man, little girl, who died long ago, who you'll never meet and never be like; from a man all white and beige and bearded who died clutching his discoveries to his chest with hands like a plant press squashing the life out of them till they were flat as paper and dry enough to label in Latin. And how fast does a flower grow? As fast as your questions will die, kiddo, falling fallow to the ground like unfertilized seeds, because no one bothered to notice your soft petal awakening.

Root: anchors the plant and serves as the major point of entry for water and minerals...

I think about that girl sometimes, and wonder what her chances are -- whether there is someone in her life (a teacher, a woman, a girl) who will nurture her inquisitiveness. I try to remember where my own love for growing things began, and I think of my first friend, Sarah, who had the ability to recreate reality to better suit two city girls in love with nature. We would traipse down 8th St. in sunbonnets, convinced that we lived on a prairie, instead of 17 stories above an urban jungle. But no matter how we tried to fly above those New York rooftops, we remained rooted in concrete.

That's how we grew, like the trees that lined the sidewalk, slow and skinny out of our own square inch -- two pale little girls with ashy gray knees and the taste of asphalt in our mouths. Sarah was always taller than me; maybe that's why I was constantly looking up to her. Or maybe it was the way her birthday always came along teetering on the edge of February like a balancing act, just about to fall into leap year where little girls only had a birthday every four years. By the time my birthday came around, Sarah had already been that age for six months, so that the number was stale as the August air we breathed. I didn't mind, though -- it was just a given; Sarah was there and I was always right there next to her.

Even the first day of kindergarten, staring at each other over a frozen juice can wrapped in black construction paper and containing new crayons, every color pointing awkwardly out of the can like stork legs, presenting infinite possibilities. Playing at orphan, playing at doctor, making medicine cabinet potions filled with the forbidden. Summers of 5 & 10 stores where our first purchases of frosted lipstick were made, as washed out and lavender as that wilted city sky...

And then there was a space around high school when we each spurted up jagged as bread knives, and, fitting each other awkwardly, we parted to struggle through our separate puberties. But we made it back to each other years later in a new and grown up way, surprised at how much we shared in our views, as though we hadn't been shaped by the same city streets. And now that we have branched out beyond our own sidewalk, now that I've so proudly watched her bear leaves and fruit, flowering up and out each year, I look back down at my own two feet and I see that we never quite got away after all. Two skinny trees growing tall above the rooftops, higher than even the pigeons, one next to the other with our feet planted firmly beneath the cement of Bleecker St.

Secondary growth: Involves the activity of lateral meristems; the continued division of their cells results primarily in a thickening of the plant body.

My worry for that girl mounts when I think of her going through puberty. I don't know how I made it through adolescence intact. I try to remember exactly when that happened, when growing became painful. It was in junior high, which I survived solely because of my friend Jessie. I just hope that little kid has a best friend - it's the only armor I know of for combating an adolescence of the "Welcome to the Dollhouse" variety.

But it wasn't always a battle; I distinctly remember a brief time when Jessie and I were all-powerful, smarter than grown-ups and freer than children, when being 13 was the coolest thing around. Back when our hair was long and stringy, running down our backs like tendrils of some unstoppable vine, in the days of braces tight enough to make us grimace in pain -- that American girl's rite of passage into beauty, our smiles bound and hobbling along helpless in their metal cages. Which didn't stop us from smiling -- we were all grins and giddiness, in a time that was so fragile and we didn't even know it -- moments before we would bite down, aching jaws and all, on that mealy apple of consciousness that for 13 year old girls in our society simply meant self-consciousness. Years of sucking in your stomach and your pride in who you were and how you could make people laugh...that confidence was felled easily like a sapling that never stood a chance, like an unstoppable vine with new tendrils curling about subway poles and books and the moorings along the Hudson River -- severed in one snip. And it all just fell away like hair cut short.

Did you know, Jessie, even then? You always were more aware of the world around us. Did you know how fragile those last moments were, those glass eyelashes growing out of the sleeping eye of childhood, that blinking feather of a moment when the eye opens and sees but has not yet been told how to look.

That was the strongest I've ever been. Just before the glass shattered and struck me blind to the beauty in me, that blink before consciousness became self-consciousness and I began the journey of forgetting who I was and becoming who I was supposed to be. It's funny, I've been making my way back ever since.