[47] Act V, Scene II.
"There be many sorts of Columbines as well differing in form as color of the flowers, and of them, both single and double, carefully nursed up in our gardens for the delight both of their forms and colors. The variety of the colors of these flowers are very much, for some are wholly white, some of a blue, or violet, color, others of a bluish, or flesh, color, or deep, or pale, red, or of a dead purple, or dead murrey color, as Nature listeth to show."
The generic name is derived from the word aquila, an eagle, because of the fancied resemblance of some parts of the flower to the talons of an eagle. The English name comes from the Latin columba, a dove, from the likeness of its nectaries to the heads of doves in a ring around a dish, or to the figure of a dove hovering with expanded wings discovered by pulling off one petal with its detached sepals. Hence this was called the dove plant. From the belief that it was the favorite plant of the lion it was called Herba leonis.
The columbine was valued for many medicinal virtues.
"The scarlet and yellow columbine," writes Matthew, "is one of our most beautiful wild flowers. It is my experience that certain flowers have certain favorite haunts, which are exclusively held by them year after year. This flower is in its prime about the first of June, and is nearly always found beside some lichen-covered rock."
The English and American flowers differ, although the early colonists brought the English flower with them. Grant Allen tells us:
"The English columbine is a more developed type than the American scarlet, is never yellow in the wild state, but often purple, and, sometimes, blue. Larkspur, ranking still higher in the floral scale, in virtue of its singular bilateral blossoms, is usually blue, though it sometimes reverts to reddish-purple, or white; while monkshood, the very top of the tree on this line of development, is usually deep ultramarine, only a few species being prettily variegated with pale blue and white. As a rule, blue flowers are the very highest; and the reason seems to lie in the strange fact, first discovered by Sir John Lubbock, that bees are fonder of blue than of any other color. Still, they are fond enough even of red; and one may be sure that the change from yellow to scarlet in the petals of the American columbine is due in one way or another to the selective tastes and preferences of the higher insects."
The colors of the American columbine are dark opaque blues, smoky purples, dull pinks, pale blues, lavenders, reds and yellows—an infinite variety!
"The flowering of the 'Columbine Commendable,' as Skelton called it four hundred years ago," says Harriet L. Keeler, "marks the beginning of summer. The reign of the bulbs is over;
The windflower and the violet
They perished long ago;