Flowers seem to come suddenly, without warning, painting hillsides and meadows with streaks of crimson, ochre, violet, and magenta. I especially love the tiny flowers – twinflower, chickweed, pussy toes, pearly everlasting, stickseed, wild violets. The exotic-looking blooms are always stars of the show; lady’s slipper, monkshood, shooting star, prince’s pine (also called pipsissewa), venus (or fairy) slippers. To see some of my earlier photos of these flowers, you can go to my section Wildflowers & Berries under the page My Photography.
Reading up on wildflower folklore is always fascinating. I especially love the Ojibwe tale of how the lady’s slipper flower came to be in its strange shape and patterns. There are many retellings and slight differences, but the root of the tale is of a girl who sets out on a journey in the cold, desolate winter to find medicine for her sick people, who were ill from a plague. Many died, including the village healer, which is why this girl set forth to find healing for her village. She found the medicine, but left a trail of bloody footprints when she lost her moccasins as the journey went on. When spring came, the bloody footprints then grew into what many First Nations call moccasin flowers, or lady’s slipper flowers. The “blood”, or red patterns in the delicate shoe of this flower, symbolizes the blood of the girl.
Above all things, flowers are a signal, a bright beacon to bees, wasps, butterflies, hummingbirds, that they are ready to be pollinated. Without pollinators, the entire human population would collapse and die. It’s fascinating, and oftentimes humbling, to realize how strongly we depend on our food being pollinated by insects and animals.
This blog celebrates the colourful joy that flowers bring to their ecosystems, weaving in folklore, food, and beauty.
Thanks for sharing the Ojibway story! I am curious of how many of these flowers are indigenous to BC or North America? Weird name: “Purple-dead nettle”.
I’m not exactly sure on the native-ness of the wildflowers featured in my post. I do know that species such as knapweed and butter-and-eggs are considered invasive. And yes, purple dead-nettle is an interesting name – it’s a neat plant too.