Columbine

I don't see it like a dove :(

I think the idea is that it is a group of doves clustering together - I have grown them for years, and it never would have struck me before...

(I think perhaps it's a bit more like geese, actually!)

I see it now, tho' agree with you that it is more like geese.

I can see it too Mel ! I would never have thought of this though !

Interesting, isn't it?

Lovely, fragile flower.

It is :-)

Oh yes!! I didn't know they were named after Doves..how interesting!

They had a lady on GW who holds the National Collection of aquilegias, and she mentioned it too, after I posted this. It's funny when coincidences occur like that. I did Latin at school (a long time ago!) but I hadn't associated the name with "dove". Which I should have done, because "puella - girl", "parva - small" and "columba - dove" were on the first page of the text book!

lol...what a memory you have!

For some things... Lol!

I think ours started with 'Hic est Caecilius' and there was a 'puella' on the page, but no dove - Cambridge Schools Latin Project, also many years ago! It was great, but at the time I couldn't grasp the grammar at all; it was taught in a strange way and by many different teachers. I'd love to re-learn it now.

Me too - I loathed it at school, but what I remember, I have found surprisingly useful (at the time, I would have refused to believe that.) We had ancient books called "Approach to Latin", many of which had been defaced to read "Approach to Eating", which we thought hilarious, of course. It had a vocabulary list at the back with translation and "O me miserum" was translated as "Oh hang it all!", which rather gives a flavour of the times in which it must have been produced, don't you think? (A bit before my time, as they tend to say on "Pointless") Our Latin teacher did not approve of the translation, so if it ever cropped up (which we made sure it did) it would get converted to "Woe is me!", which says a lot about the Latin teacher! A bit like "Eheu!" ("alas") which we liked to produce as a sneeze...