Quaker ladies?

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Ahhh! Spring slowly returns. Although, I suspect, the Quaker ladies knew it would.

Bluets, another low-to-the-ground wildflower that grows in the front of my house, survived last night’s freezing temperatures. It greeted this morning's sunrise with a defiant yellow eye.

This commonplace plant is also known as Quaker-ladies, a colorful old folk name that despite a good search, I do not know its origin. If you have information on such, please send me a comment. I suspect it has something to do with the bonnets the Quaker women wore. Perhaps, their chapeaux were also a pale blue?

Thoreau noted a cluster of bluets in his journal on May 5, 1860: “I sit down by one dense bed of them to examine them. It’s about three feet long and two or more wide. The flowers not only crowd one another, but are in several tiers, one above another, and completely hid the ground,—a mass of white. Counting those in a small place, I find that there are about three thousand flowers in a square foot. They are all turned a little toward the sun, and emit a refreshing odor.”


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