Columbines

I used to weed out ones I wasn’t so keen on, the pale pinks, the small flowered ones, they’re insipid I said, but now (age, my age!) I let them be, and they have affairs and breed, and this moment it’s a ball – girlish colours, pale yellow with magnificent spurs, powder blue and white, pink, pink and white beside dark macho blues.  They sway together, bending and kissing.  Promiscuous is the  word botanists use about flowers like these, condemning their glorious open handed love.

How they love this chalky soil, dry but fertile, and spring up all over the place. I bought ‘Victoriana’ from the WI market, pink with an elaborate white Elizabethan ruff, and hope she mingles and produces – all in due course.

Columbine is a dove, I think because the hooked spurs at the back look like doves circled round a bowl, drinking.  The official name Aquilegia is because the spurs also resemble eagle claws.  Granny bonnets is a modern name, totally artificial because invented long after grannies gave up wearing bonnets.