Fritillaries …

 

Frittering away … well enjoying some time-space … with a nodding head as the Winter and early Spring disappear before an easier Summer, one (I do) hope/s, at least on the nature side, arrives …

Snake's-head Fritillary

Diddle away dissipate fribble away … words, words, words … aren't we lucky to have so many expressions to illustrate our ideas …

I'm on slow-go time … lots to do, and no doubt will get there … so in the meantime … some wonderful plants from a by-gone era …

Nodding Meleagris
in the meadow

Fritillaries first recognised in Europe in the late 1500s … characterised by nodding flower heads … probably brought over from the Middle East ...

Cultivated (Dutch) Fritillaries

... in Oxford there's a wild meadow, which hasn't been cultivated for centuries, as it's annually flooded …

... once the fritillaries in Iffley Meadows have finished their flowering, the deer herd is moved in for the summer and autumn …

Meadow Fritillary - underside of the female

Shakespeare in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis, Adonis metamorphoses into a purple flower checked with white:

By this, the boy that by her side lay kill’d

Was melted like a vapour from her sight,

And in his blood that on the ground lay spill’d,

A purple flower sprung up, chequer’d with white.

Helmeted Guinea Fowl in Namibia

The Latin specific epithet 'meleagris' means “spotted like a guineafowl” …

Then I came across the 'Fritillary' an academic term's magazine of the Oxford Women's Colleges … published between 1894 and 1931 …

Fritillary
Summer term
1927 magazine

... which I'd noted in the book Joanne Faries had reviewed last December … titled “The Eights” …

... and came about from Joanne Faries at her Word Splash blog in December last year when she reviewed “The Eights” - about four women in 1920 starting at Oxford University … which took me back to my school days in Oxford, and brought some history to life …

... and then oh yes! - in the book Joanne recommended … 'The Hilary Term' … which has just finished. I'm more than delighted today … I'm cheered at the coincidences!!

So here's to hope – I do fall on the side of optimism … and relate to my name derived from the Latin 'hilarius' – cheerful merry...

Section or Semester heading

Joanne Faries - Word Splash blog 'The Eights'

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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