I couldn't identify this wildflower which we found at Littleferry on Tuesday despite over an hour of increasingly frustrated thumbing through the three big books I have and a fair amount of clicking on the internet. I had sat back, almost giving up, when a memory struck me, of....
....walking at Sanna in September 2014 - link to Kilchoan Diary post here - and finding the first gentian I had ever seen.
The reason I hadn't found the mystery flower is that the colour one associate with gentians is purple, but this particular autumn gentian Gentianella amarella ssp septentrionalis, is a less common white variety mainly found in the northern half of Scotland - see link here.
Memory, at my age, is so fickle: I have no idea where the connection to Sanna came from. However, we have other memories of gentian, in the form of an antibacterial, antifungal medicine called gentian violet that was used on us in our childhood days, in my case to paint between my toes to deal with athletes' foot.
No comments:
Post a Comment