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By Any Other Name

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A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident

 Near our back door among a variety of unwelcome and uncultivated weeds I saw these beautiful buds on long, thin stems. “Is that a flower or a weed? It sure looks like a flower to me.” 

“It’s columbine,” my wife said. 

I recoiled from the buds I had admired a moment before. “Columbine” still carries a terrible association with the Colorado high school of that name, which suffered a mass shooting in 1999. 

The school shares the name of the Colorado state flower, but remains such a morbid tourist attraction the superintendent has considered closing it and razing the building. 

 Columbine derives from the Latin word for dove. The five buds, like those in the photo, are said to resemble five doves. The flower is also called Granny’s Bonnet, while the name of the species is based on the Latin for eagle’s claw. Clearly the flower allows for widely divergent interpretations of its shape. 

The appearance of these plants on the other side of the house from where the seeds were originally placed shows that columbine is self-seeding or self-sowing. 

Because of its beauty and because it travels but doesn’t endlessly multiply and drive out other plants, it is a flower, not a weed and is not invasive. 

It can be found in many colors, is deer-resistant and a popular pollinator for bees and butterflies. One might add a flower or two to a salad for color and sweetness, but don’t add any seeds or roots. These are very toxic and also carcinogenic. 

“Where the Columbine Grows” was written by Arthur Flynn and adopted as the Colorado official state song in 1915. It is difficult to believe it was written over a century ago. Here is its third verse: 

“The bison is gone from the upland,
The deer from the canyon has fled,
The home of the wolf is deserted,
The antelope moans for his dead,
The war whoop re-echoes no longer,
The Indian’s only a name,
And the nymphs of the grove in their loneliness rove,
But the columbine blooms just the same.”

** Please do not pick & eat any forest plant without the advice of an expert.

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