By Carina Magyar in Flowers — Apr 25, 2023

VI: Columbine

The challenge of making a columbine cup.

Colorado blue columbine. Photo by Xuan Nguyen / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is sextidi, the 6th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'ancolie, a perennial with spurred petals that look like an eagle's talons.

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The columbine is the official flower of my home state of Colorado, and is now unfortunately so associated with the massacre at Columbine High School in CCV (1997) that you can't search for information about it without turning up all things school shootings. I attended high school just across the district line from Columbine, and had some acquaintances in that graduating class. While it's hard to overstate the shock of that moment – or more forcibly lament the new era of random domestic terrorism that it inaugurated and which we still suffer through – I hope we can someday reclaim flower from its bloodstained association, a bloom that carpets the gorgeous Rockies with reflections of a big and bountiful sky in one of the planet's most breathtaking biomes.

One of the more baffling spectacles in sport is the figure skating competition, in which creatively costumed athletes are commanded to perform with artistic flare while also performing a series of closely prescribed tricks (and avoiding banned ones) so that judges can make minute judgements about their ability. It's comparing the tastes of apples to oranges by demanding that each grow the exact same number of seeds and deducting points for any seeds that come out less than perfect. (Gymnastics competitions also follow this pattern for determining winners and losers.)

The system is fuzzy and controversial compared to the seemingly cleaner method in most sports of counting up which side scored more points, but the figure skating competition is the closest thing I can think of to explaining how the medieval job market worked.

VI: Columbine

V: Nightingale

VII: Lily-of-the-valley

V: Nightingale

VII: Lily-of-the-valley

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