Thursday, June 13, 2013

Red Peony


I found this photo captioned "the peony whose beauty is partially obscured by bluebells" here. Then I used it  (with credit) on a recent morning as my contribution to Silas & Eppie, the daily game of random side-by-side image-matching that I play with my daughter. This enterprise preserves for us a trail of visual preferences leading all the way back to 2008. We began Silas & Eppie in September of that year, after I had set up this site in July. They are siblings, separated by only a few months. Consequently, both are on the verge of their five-year birthdays.

I personally think of the flowers in the foreground (above) as campanula because that is what they are called in the plant nurseries where I have seen them and bought them. Bluebells and campanula are the same, I discover. In the rural Middle West growing up I never encountered this plant at all, so the common name bluebells calls up an image that does not resemble this flower. It is instead some bluebell of my own imagining.