Columbine

a fragrant honey-bearing flower of the buttercup family. This delightful flower is often called a honeysuckle, a shrubby plant to which it is not related. The American columbine blooms in May and June. The flowers grow on a woodland perennial herb two feet high. The five petals are, all alike, prolonged backward into straight honey-bearing spurs. The flowers are of a handsome delicate scarlet outside and yellow inside. They are pendant or nodding at first, but straighten up when they go to seed. The Rocky Mountain columbine has incurved spurs. It is blue or purplish, or even white. The garden columbine of Europe is the flower to which Jean Ingelow says: O Columbine ! open your folded wrapper, Where two twin turtle-doves dwell.

The Scotch call these flowers "auld ladies' mutchie," or caps.

Admirers of the columbine have urged its adoption as our national flower. They claim that the common name is derived from columba, a dove, the bird of peace; that it suggests Columbus, the discoverer of America; that its Latin name, aquilegia, is derived from the name of the eagle, the bird of America; that the flower would lend itself readily to artistic designs; that the shape of the flower suggests a liberty cap; and, finally, that the columbine is widely dispersed and universally beloved by children and all lovers of flowers.

Our columbine is at all times and in all places one of the most exquisitely beautiful of flowers; yet one spring day, when I saw it growing out of a small seam on the face of a great lichen covered wall of rock, where no soil or mould was visible,--a jet of foliage and color shooting out of a black line on the face of a perpendicular mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain, its drops turning to flame-colored jewels that hung and danced in the air against the gray rocky surface,--its beauty became something magical and audacious.-Burroughs, Riverby.