Lungwort

Today's the day ........................... for a botany lesson

I have to come clean about yesterday's daffodil picture and confess that they weren't actually in flower in the garden. For blip purposes you understand, I temporarily relocated them from inside in the hall to the outside. However, the ones today are most definitely fully in flower in the garden - a minor miracle considering the cold, wet weather we have recently.

Their proper name is Pulmonaria officinalis and they belong to the borage family. The Pulmonaria bit comes from the latin pulmoa meaning lung and was first used by Leonhart Fuchs (1501 - 1566), a German physician and one of the three founding fathers of botany. The species has been named officinalis by Carl Linnaeus for the medical properties of these plants, used since the Middle Ages to treat coughs and diseases of the chest including tuberculosis and asthma

It has very pretty flowers that start off pink and later turn to blue-purple - something to do with them containing a dye which changes the pH value. But for all the scientific facts that you can read about them, I'm just glad to have a sign in the garden that spring is on the way .........................