A simple flower so small and plain

Wood Anemone
(source: Wikimedia Commons)

Walking in the woods below Carwinion (just down the coast from Trebah) a few days ago I came across banks of wood anemones. Their white, star-bell flowers put me in mind of a song by Gillian Welch about another early spring flower, Acony Bell.

Just a simple flower so small and plain

With a pearly hue and a little-known name

But the yellow birds sing when they see it bloom

For they know that spring is coming soon

(You can hear the song here.)

When I got home the tune was still stuck in my head and I googled ‘Acony Bell’ to see if it’s related to the wood anemone. Which it isn’t, though it does look a bit similar. And it turns out to have a intriguing history.

Acony Bell
(source: www.michaux.org)

Also known as the Oconee Bell, it grows in the Appalachian mountains on the borders of Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1838, the American botanist Asa Gray saw a dried, fragmentary specimen in a Paris herbarium and became strangely bewitched by this unassuming little flower, to which he gave the Latin name Shortia Glaucifolia. There was no other evidence of the plant’s existence, but finding it in the wild became his lifelong obsession.

Despite arduous expeditions to the Appalachians – then even wilder than they are now – he failed to track it down, and other botanists were sceptical that it actually existed. But in 1877, towards the end of his life, Gray was sent a specimen found on the banks of the  Catawba River that finally bore out his belief.

He saw this as the crowning moment of his career,  worth far more than the many scientific honours that had by then been heaped upon him. “It is before me with corolla and all from North Carolina! Think of that! My long faith rewarded at last,” he wrote. “Now let me sing my nunc dimittis!” 

The full story is told here.