Pink Chrysanthemum
I absolutely adore this image. In fact, I’d say it’s in the running for my all-time favorite floral. I love everything about it – the bright, vibrant colors, the contrast between the vivid flower and the black background, the way the petals almost seem to have a checkerboard pattern to them (how does Mother Nature do that, anyway?). As soon as I saw this one I knew it was headed straight for my Etsy shop.
I only had one small problem.
What the heck was it? How could I give it a name if I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was? Now I love flowers – to look at, to photograph, to smell (atchoo! sorry, they also make me sneeze) – but I can’t grow them to save my life. I have the world’s blackest thumb. I can even kill plastic plants given half a chance. Plant stores bar their doors when they see me coming with my Black Finger of (Plant) Death. Given this, it’s no surprise that I’m not exactly up on my flower names.
I did what any self-respecting city girl would do – I called the florist down the block and asked her. She was quite certain that it was a chrysanthemum, but when I showed the image to a number of friends several were convinced it was in fact a gerbera daisy.
Hmmm…
Chrysanthemum or daisy? (I need to get this right or I’ll look like an idiot, I thought to myself.)
I took the next logical step and started googling “pink chrysanthemums”. Strange, most of those looked quite different. Still, it didn’t really look like the gerberas I’d seen either, the center was wrong.
I finally struck gold when I google “pink chrysanthemum with yellow center”, which brought me to a garden site (with really lousy pictures by the way, I should offer them mine) that explained that chrysanthemums are in fact members of the daisy family. A-ha! That explains it – it’s both! A chrysanthemum, AND a relative of the gerbera daisy.
Phew. Mystery solved. Now I can get back to solving the really important crisis in my life – where the heck have all those odd socks gone, and are they going to come back before I break down and go buy more?
Click here to purchase a copy of this gorgeous photo for yourself. And when you do, tell me which way you plan to hang it, because I can’t decide for myself which direction I prefer – it looks great each way!
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