Is it any wonder some days I don't even leave the house? Just wander around back there, watering and pinching and smelling. Eating, even.A little excursion: The flower is a columbine. Yes, the now-icky name of the high school in Colorado where a massacre took place several years ago. It hasn't made the flower any less lovely, though, or strange. It's so Alien! Very Giger, and click here to see what I'm talking about.
Another excursion: In the enchanting movie King of Hearts, the beautiful love interest played by Geneviève Bujold is named Coquelicot. But in the English subtitles, her name is translated to Columbine. Yet, coquelicot is actually a poppy. Why wouldn't she want to be called Poppy?
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The beautiful blue columbine is the state flower of Colorado. It grows wild throughout the Rockies. Many other colors flourish in abundance in lovely mountain gardens.
I have an original (American release) poster from King of Hearts somewhere around here. I remember seeing it when I was very young. (Yes, my parents were cool and didn't mind that their child got to look at Alan Bates' bare butt.)
I love columbine and had many in the yard before the tenants took to my flower beds with their indiscriminate trowels. But that's another story for another time.
BTW, I think I channeled you a little in my OLS post this week. Well, except for the part where you end up with a successful meal!
I thought I remembered that columbines are pollinated by either birds or moths with tongues long enough to reach into the "spurs" where the nectar is stored; here's the story, if you are interested:
http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/plants/2001sp_columbines.html
Scroll down to "Pollinator Preferences." I love botany - very cool!
Lovely photo! The light in that picture is really warm. No wonder you stay home all day some days. Would that I could, too! :-)
columbine is also found here, and considered a native plant... that is an awesome photo!
We call columbines Grannies Bonnets round our way, they are one of my favourites, even though I'm not very sucessful at growing them.
Love your leaps and digressions. Allow me one.....When Alan Bates was a featured guest at the SF Film Festival eons ago a friend was tapped to do a dinner for him (in Marin). She made a totally American meal that featured fried chicken and he loved it and then went out to see her columbines -- well, not really, about the columbines.....Take all the time you can appreciating your new homestead. It's important.
My first baby name was going to be 'Poppy'. But then in my 30's it changed to 'Thyme'. Now I am in my 40's it's changed to 'what's a baby????"
How pretty! I love columbines.
I've always known them as aqualegia (sp?)when I've grown them. That is just lovely. If only we could get some peace and quiet in my garden, then I'd probably spend a bit more time there :(
Anonymous: I can't believe it grows wild! It looks like the results of a mad botanist, doing generation upon generation of recombinant splicing, crossed with Martian DNA. Bwa-ha-ha! And yet, so lovely.
MizD: You got to "look" at it. I was old enough to appreciate it.
Pam: That is so weird. Nature -- it just wouldn't work without all those little tics and twitches.
Zoomie: Thank you. I'm so behind on my inside-the-housework, because I can't get out of the backyard.
Stacie: Native!! I'm just lucky I still have this little potted baby; it completely went dormant after the first year, and I'm so thrilled to see it revive.
DMM: I would have agreed with you that I'm not successful at growing them. This one even caught a nasty case of powdery mildew two years ago... But it seems to like its new home. (Grannie Bonnets! Snicker.)
Kudzu: Are you saying he went out there to water the plants? Or to take advantage of your friend's, um, gifts? Either way, cool.
Sam: I like Thyme. Oh, wow. Now you've got my head spinning. Marjoram, Stevia, Estragon? :D
Dagny: I'm still getting used to them. It's unbelievably *strange*, and yet I'm so captivated.
Jennywenny: Peace and quiet in a backyard? Just now I was saying to Cranky, "I wish I could sing in my yard." I don't do it, because I think the neighbors would hate it... But I think a little human cacophony is permissible. Dogs, too.
Where I come from, "Columbine" used to be the name of a filling removing caramel candy that you'd buy at the movies. You'd spend hours afterwards, finger in mouth, trying to scrape the bits of caramel off your teeth.
The outdoors is much more fun than the indoor work, anyway. :-)
CC,
I ran across and old, tattered portfolio of Giger prints in NYC several years ago. I was really tempted to buy it but it was in bad sahpe and at $125 wasn't cheap. I settled for a couple of Giger prints which I've never had the nerve to get framed.
Chester, we called those movie lollies cobbers!
I made a columbine post a while back. I had heard (and nobody has substantiated it for me yet) that the long thingys on the back of the flowers are completely lacking in European, or at least British, columbines, because they don't have hummingbirds! In other words, it's a new world adaptation. Pretty one, too.
Chester: I'm just amazed. Never heard of it. I'd probably be more inclined to buy a candy with the super-inviting name of -- wait -- Three Musketeers? Whoa. Who makes up these names?
Zoomie: Can I stave off the indoor work for several more months? Yes. Thanks.
Kevin: Of all people. You. A Giger fan. Do you think anybody else here knows what we're talking about? (His stuff was always overpriced.)
DMM: That sounds like a mouthful of Australian. I didn't understand a thing.
El: Apparently you are right that the European "cultivar" (ew, fancy but probably wrong) is different, but in the US, the hummingbird's tongue is actually too short for the spurs. But, wow, what an evolutionary Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
Go see.
El: Update. My mom writes to say I may not have read the link info closely enough. Hummers do have tongues that can lick all the way inside, and by doing so, their heads rub up against the pollen, and. Well. You know. Birds & bees. Cool.
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