Larkspur

Larkspur, Delphinium and the closely allied annual delphiniums, is a tall spike-flowered plant of the buttercup family, its blossoms most often a brilliant blue. Two names describe the flower's shape: larkspur, for the long backward spur of each bloom, likened to the hind claw of a lark; and delphinium, from the Greek for dolphin, for the resemblance of the unopened bud to a dolphin's body. It is a plant to admire and not to eat: larkspur is genuinely poisonous in all its parts, a serious hazard to grazing livestock, a fact stated here plainly as caution.

Despite its toxicity, or rather because of it, larkspur had a genuine practical use: a tincture made from the seed, rich in the alkaloid delphinine, was a standard folk and even early pharmaceutical treatment for head lice and body lice into the twentieth century, applied externally to the scalp and clothing rather than taken internally, a documented use of the plant's poison turned to a specific practical purpose. The same alkaloids that made it dangerous to livestock are still studied today for their action on the nervous system, though none of this makes any part of the plant safe to handle carelessly, since the alkaloid is absorbed readily even through the skin.

A classical myth ties the larkspur, like the hyacinth, to the blood of the hero Ajax: when he killed himself in shame after the arms of Achilles were awarded to Odysseus, a flower was said to spring from his blood bearing on its petals the letters of his grief. In folk practice larkspur was a protective flower, held to guard against ghosts, scorpions and venomous creatures and to preserve against the evil eye, and it was strewn or hung for that purpose. As the birth-flower of July and in the language of flowers it stood for lightness, levity and an open heart. Beauty, a hero's blood, and protection against the unseen gather to a poisonous blue spike.

Classical scholars have long debated which real flower the Greek myths of the blood-flower actually describe, since the plant later called hyacinth by botanists, Hyacinthus orientalis, does not carry the markings the ancient poets describe, leading some to argue that the Greek hyacinthos named a different flower altogether, possibly a wild iris, gladiolus or larkspur relative, so that larkspur's own claim to the story sits within a wider, genuinely unresolved argument about which modern flower, if any, the ancient sources meant. The confusion is a useful reminder that a great deal of classical plant-naming was done by poets rather than botanists, and that a name recorded in verse two and a half thousand years ago cannot always be pinned with confidence to a single species growing today.