Birthday Flowers

I've been championing the idea of a birthday flower, that is a flower that blossoms on your birthday. And here's the most recent picture of mine: the naked lady or autumn crocus.

These grow in the parkway a few blocks from my house. I love how they mysteriously appear and just as mysteriously disappear. I wanted to pick one but I know they are poisonous so I didn't (although I think maybe only the bulb is poisonous).

Linnaeus named the autumn crocus, colchicum, after Colchis, the island on which the poisoner and sorceress Medea lived. It has even more wonderful common names. I know it as a naked lady. It's a naked maiden in Germany (because it has no leaves, just a bare flower stalk). In France, they are called dog-killers and bare-bottoms. In England, Wilfrid Blunt (who gives this delightful list) mentions the names: upstarts, daggers, kite’s legs, naked boys and naked nannies. While the Arabs call them, he says, the lamps of the ghoul. That's my favorite. Do they look like the lamps of the ghoul? Maybe a little.

Autumn Crocus Revisited

Here they are two days later.

I'll check again on my birthday.

In Time for my Birthday

Last year, I wrote about how the amaryllis belladoonna is the flower my mother associates with my upcoming birthday (September 4) because it blooms around that date in Southern California where I was born (Burbank, to be exact). And about how the autumn crocus blooms on my birthday here in Seattle.

And here it is, a week before my birthday. I love how ghostly the flowers look as they emerge from the ground, almost more like mushrooms than flowers in their fleshiness which is probably why they are also known as naked ladies, just like the amaryllis belladonna.