Perfect Weather for Windflowers

Bright and breezy today, perfect weather for the wood anemones Anemone nemorosa, which are in full flower in woodlands around Durham city. Its scientific name comes from the Greek word for wind, anemos, and when a gust blows across the woodland floor thousands of anemone flowers shiver on flower stalks that are as slender as a thread. Many modern books on British wild flowers repeat the story that the Roman naturalist Pliny (c. 77AD) believed that it was the wind that brought anemones into bloom in the spring ("The flower never opens, except while the wind is blowing, a circumstance to which it owes its name"); however, it wouldn't have been this species that he had in mind, but the far more robust, scarlet-flowered Anemone coronaria that blooms throughout the eastern Mediterranean in spring. Pliny's writings are fascinating source of natural history information, some of it fanciful, some of it accurate and perceptive. You can consult them on-line at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plin.+Nat.+toc