“Forsythia are magical,” my son informed me as we were driving home one day. Because I have been reading the first three Harry Potter books to him (we’re saving book four for when he gets a little older — that scene in Little Hangleton is a bit intense for a 5-year-old), I thought he might have use for forsythia in a potion of some kind. We had also recently built a Nimbus 2000 broom using forsythia twigs for the bristles, so maybe he thought they had magical flying properties.

“I like the way they have bright yellow flowers in the spring and then turn dark green in the summer,” he went on. “Daddy, do you like forsythia?” I admitted that I like them mainly because they are easy to care for and they form nice, big masses that take up landscaping space. I felt like a bit of a philistine, to be honest, liking this magical plant mainly because I’m too much of an inept gardener to do much else.

My son is in many ways a fairly normal American kid. He likes to watch videos and play with Star Wars toys. He also loves to spend as much time as he can outside, and, as the weather moves in frustrating fits and starts toward spring, he plans for the day when he does not need to wear a coat on our hikes in Huntington.

We are fortunate to have a large open space like Huntington less than 10 minutes’ drive from our house, and I have been taking advantage of it since I moved to Bethel 13 years ago. Now that my son is old enough to explore it with me, I’ve been learning new ways to see the park, and, in turn, I’ve been learning new ways to look at the world.

When I first started hiking in Huntington, I did so with a big dog who loved walks. For Seamus, a walk was serious business, and walking was what we did — when I dared to stop for more than a few minutes, he would howl to let me know we needed to keep moving.

With a 5-year-old who needs to know everything about everything, though, walks are less about walking and more about exploring. Emerson said, in his essay Nature, “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.” For the child, the landscape is not a passive scene but something to be savored, tasted, touched, and questioned. The dead tree ceases to be an impediment to climb over and transforms into a toy to play on, a meteorology lesson about winds that blow trees down, and an opportunity to meditate on death and decay. The jumble of boulders is a castle one minute before becoming a Jedi hideout. I then have to resurrect memories of geology to describe the process of glaciation that led to the moraine pattern we are playing on.

It is simple for adults to dismiss Emerson’s sentiment as just that — a Romantic sentiment about childhood innocence that has fallen into treacly cliché — but to do so is to reinforce our own arrogance. We know facts, but that doesn’t save us. Scientists all over the world tell us we are warming our planet to dangerous levels, that we are filling our air and water with carcinogens, that we risk killing our future. We know those facts but choose not to believe them.

Perhaps if we, like our children, were aware of the magic of the forsythia, we would be more willing to respect our world.

Rick Magee, a Bethel resident, is an English professor. His column appears monthly in Hearst Connecticut Media. Contact him at r.m.magee.writer@gmail.com.