flowers

Honesty

/ Anna / 1 Comment

The walk home from work is a dull one. For all the grandeur Edinburgh has in her city centre, there are as many outlying areas of anonymous suburbia. My walk passes through some of these areas, with little of interest save a small section of the Water of Leith. There on the banks, last week, I spotted a tall plant showing off its purple flowers. I didn’t recognise it and without having my plant book to hand, a quick text to my mum tells me it’s Honesty (thanks mum!).

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Excuse the terrible quality of the photo; with thanks to Wikimedia for a better quality one…

Honesty in flower
Despite Honesty’s apparent ubiquity I don’t recall noticing it before. It’s the first flower I’ve seen in bloom this year, with only the earliest of blossoming trees being out so far. As I always do, I looked it up, intrigued by any other names it goes by. I found a solitary reference to it called gealach-lus in Gaelic, meaning ‘moon plant’. I can’t find any other reference to it by that name so I presume it’s simply to correspond with the latin name, Lunaria annua. Either way, I’m quite taken by it and am looking forward, as the seasons progress, to do as my mum says: collect the dried seedheads and decorate the house with those little moons.

Honesty seedheads

Flùraichean – flowers

/ Anna / 2 Comments

flùraicheanfloo-reech-en   Pronounce the -‘ch’ as if you were saying ‘loch’. Run the sounds together, gently does it; emphasis on the first syllable. There you are – that’s how you say ‘flowers’ in Gaelic.

Summer seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Granted, there was a spell over the weekend where it was cold and windy and everyone was back in their wooly jumpers, but for the most part the past few weeks have been glorious. Every inch of grassland has some kind of flower or jolly plant growing on it, sprung into life.

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Baby birds are appearing from their nests, waddling about warily. It’s lovely, really. Remind me of evenings like this, evenings where it’s calm, warm, relatively midge-free. It’s barely dark for anytime at all so midnight walks are perfectly acceptable; farmers nearby are out working their fields ’til all hours making the most of the good weather. It feels like a waste going to sleep when there’s so much daylight.

Into Spring

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A Winter malaise seems to have gotten hold of this little corner of the internet. It feels like it’s been ongoing for months and is – amongother things – hindering my attempts to finish certain tasks. Most notably of these is a test knit I’ve been working on for a while. You can see the original project here. It’s a beautiful pattern and currently one of the only things I’m grateful to Winter for – it being cold enough to wear it.

Though I’m complaining about it, the Winter is absolutely one of my favourite seasons. I adore the crispness in the air and, for the most part, the unpredictable weather. Still, every year at this stage I’m longing for a little warmth in the sun and flowers to appear. And lo – they are!

It’s incredibly to see such vivid colour after what has felt like an eternity of grey. Long may they continue to flourish…