VIII: Cyclamen
A traditional Valentine's Day flower ... or is it?
Good morning. Today is octidi, the 28th of Pluviôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le cyclamen, a flower for making love potions.
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Cyclamen goes by various other unsavory names as well: sowsbread, swinebread, pigbread. This is because of its reputation, in the wild, of being rooted up by pigs, presumably so they can feast on its underground tuber. However, the reason cyclamen gets noticed for this habit (because, after all, pigs will snuffle up lots of tubers, not just these) is that there's so much evidence left behind. At least one pig farmer notes that while her ladies love to dig up the bitter cyclamen tubers, they never actually eat it. It's the pig equivalent of a dog turning over a trash can, hoping to find something better than the used tissues inside.
How doth cyclamen show thy love? Let us count the ways:
