“Is gardening complicated?” she asks

MY DAUGHTERS are slumped in the back of the car with Zara bags underfoot.

There has been profound silence driving home from Cork. Both have been rendered completely speechless by the solipsistic exertions of a hard day’s shopping.

We approach the house. Bumping up our laneway, my eldest stirs her lolling head.

“Oh my god mum, look.”

“What?”

She points at the two little marches of trees I planted many years ago, which flank the lane-sides. “The trees! They look amazing — with the sun and everything.”

“I know,” I reply, gratified, “it’s like each tree is dancing.”

“Look at them,” she says, agape, “look at those ones with the silvery leaves.”

“I know,” I repeat, bemused “and look at the roses by the door — the pink ones — look how blowsy they are.” Leaning forward, she peers at roses. “Whoah,” she says softly.

Something odd is afoot. I suspect I might be about to witness the rebirth of a teenager’s long-buried sense of wonder at the natural world, but I could be wrong. Such a renaissance is a delicate affair. “Look at the white roses by the steps,” I venture. She looks.

At the house, my daughters grab their bags. Walking towards the front-door, my eldest stops, turns and gazes south over the garden. My youngest, right behind her, smacks into her, so by default is compelled to look at the garden too.

My eldest says wonderingly, “everything looks so nice, mum. There are flowers everywhere. I never really noticed before.”

She sits down on the steps and rolls a fag. “Is gardening complicated?” she asks.

I remind her of the vast chunk of her childhood, throughout which she toddled beside me in the garden, digging and planting with her own spade.

It seems to have dropped from her memory.

“Anyway, how difficult is it?” she says. “Could you teach me? I mean this weekend?”

Opening the door, I say “sure,” over my shoulder, tamping down my enthusiasm hard, for there’s nothing in the world that will nip her re-emerging sense of wonder in the bud so much as too much of mine.

I think about the business of wonderment in the kitchen, while she lights her fag outside.

Babies are born with a latent sense of wonder. And any old thing will spark it — a dandelion once caused my infant to convulse in tiny, rapturous shudders of awe. A duck, a running tap, even a frozen pea can activate wonder in a one-year-old. And three-year-olds aren’t much fussier — mud will do the trick.

In other words, a young child’s sense of wonder is trigger happy — like a firearm set for release at the slightest pressure — so a parent only needs to facilitate its discharge by showing it something new.

Nurturing a sense of awe in the under-11s is in actual fact, a case of preaching to the converted.

Cultivating a sense of wonder in teenagers, on the other hand, is not. In service of its cultivation, first you must argue with them until you’re blue in the face, that an appreciation of the natural world is commonly evoked by actual confrontation with the beauty of nature (as in going for a walk) or the vastness of space and time (as in looking up at the sky), and not as they suppose, elicited by such things as watching Come Dine with Me repeats, or lying around eating Cornflakes.

After arguing, you must corral them into the car, and walk them, while they mutter “herons are so flipping gay,” under their breath.

The business of cultivating a sense of wonder in your offspring, if plotted as a line on a graph (age 0-20 along the bottom, sense of wonder up the side) would follow the delineation of an upside down Bell-Curve. My daughter enters the kitchen, interrupting my thoughts, “can we go to the garden centre tomorrow, mum?” she asks, “I’d like to get some seeds.”

“Sure,” I say. In my mind’s eye, I can see the line inching up the right hand side of the upside down Bell Curve… inching upwards, bit by bit.

She yawns, “but don’t wake me up before one o’clock.”

I swallow. Like I said, such a renaissance as this is a delicate affair.

“One o’clock it is.”