Amazing Stories About Plants

We look at the hyacinth, fragrant stocks, the origin of yellow roses and the fleur-de-lis

The hyacinth

According to Greek mythology, Hyakinthos was a beautiful Spartan youth who played with the god Apollo and was accidentally killed by a blow from a quoit. Apollo was grief-stricken, and in memory of his friend caused a flower to grow up from his blood bearing the letters Al on its petals, this being the Greek for ‘woe’ or ‘alas’. Milton refers to this story in his Lycidas when he alludes to the hyacinth as ‘that sanguine flower inscribed with woe’.

Another story is that Zephyrus was jealous of Hyakinthos and killed him. There are other versions, but the one common factor is the turning of the victim’s blood into a flower and the curious marking on its petals.

Unfortunately for a pretty tale, if you look at a hyacinth flower today you will look in vain for Apollo’s brief epitaph. It seems obvious that although the flower we now call a hyacinth originated at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, it is not the plant that was known to the ancient Greeks by that name.

The name hyacinth has been given, in English, to a number of plants now regarded as botanically distinct: there are grape hyacinths, the summer hyacinth, the star hyacinth, the water hyacinth and the wild or wood hyacinth, our common bluebell or harebell. Men must have thought the last-mentioned should have been the true flower of the legend, but it bore no letters so it was given the Latin name of Hyacinthoides non-scripta.

If the first hyacinth was none of these, what was it? Various suggestions have been made, including iris, larkspur, gladiolus and the Turk’s cap or martagon lily. This last is the right colour, and, with some imagination, you can decipher little black marks as the letters Al.