I first uncovered Viper's bugloss (Echium vulgare) a few years back (sad isn't it?) by accident when I saw this marvellous blue thing on the grass verge beside the cycle path I was plying. I stopped and got down on my knees for a closer look (a behaviour encouraged by my botanist friend not by my school teachers or parents). I was amazed at how vibrant it was (and hairy) and how the insects loved it. Everytime I passed this little guy (all on his own in spite of being an 'invasive weed') I would stop and 'converse' in silence for a few minutes while I ate my blueberries and drank some water. And I soon formed a map of the strath that was informed by flowers and flowing. You had Viper's bugloss over here, Hellborine orchids over there, wild cornflowers in there. I realised as a cyclist and walker and someone who now eschews transport and the act of being carried (as if I were dead) that I too was one of them: a flower who flows according to the dictates not of man and his filthy earth-destroying machines but of the uni-verse and of the 'one who pours'. People have just forgotten how to be flowers having been waylaid by the machine, its toxins, and the brain-damage that comes with it. So, by all mean, get back on your own two feet (and into your own two hemispheres), and become the flower, Viper's bugloss or other.
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