I suppose my favourite tree is birch. It's a very Canadian tree, with papery bark for canoes. We had a birch growing near our old house in Sackville, N.B. I heard that a Russian back in the Soviet era was thinking of defecting to the West, and someone warned him, "You'll miss Russia's birch trees!"
I also like oak. (We had one of those back in Sackville too.) The oak is just about the last tree to grow new leaves in the spring, and the last to shed them in the fall: such slowness appeals to me. The First Nations figured out that when the oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, that means it's safe to plant corn.
My favorite flower is probably the sunflower. It grows so tall that when it finally opens up, you can feel you've grown something!
One plant I like is the cactus. When we moved into our new house over twenty years ago, the others were going out to buy some houseplants, and I asked them to pick up a cactus. I should have gone with them. You see, my sister (who didn't even live there!) did go and noticed that there was one plant where you could buy two for the price of one cactus, so they brought two of them instead. And I got stuck with two houseplants I had no interest in, and never did get that cactus.
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