Consider-the-Lilies Web Gallery
Fawn's Breath
I first saw this flowering shrub in early May, growing on a shaded slope in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Truly a transient beauty, these ephemeral star-flowers were gone when I came by just a few days later.
This shrub is called by at least two other common names, Bowman's Root and Indian Physic. (The dried root was used as an emetic tea by Native Americans.)
This third more fanciful common name, however, seems to me to be an apt fit for this airy beauty.
If you have visited many of the rooms in the Gallery, you have perhaps noticed that I find the etymology of the common names by which lilies are called by nonscientists to be a subject of continuing interest.
Often the common names given to native flora—some examples of which are Indian Physic for Gillenia trifoliate and American Alumroot for Heuchera americana —provide practical, straight-forward descriptions of how the plants were used by Native Americans or early settlers in North America.
But, sometimes, as in the naming of Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and Shepherd's Purse the viewing of the sublime evokes someone's imagination and a name is born that goes beyond the purely practical and utilitarian.
Thus, here, too, someone, perhaps an early settler, was moved by the delicate beauty of these blossoms to wax poetic and dub Gillenia trifoliate, "Fawn's Breath."
It was the same native perennial known to be useful in herbal medicine, of course; but how much more descriptive this name is of these fragile, pure-white lilies!
And, apparently, the appropriateness of the name has been appreciated by others, too, since this fanciful label has continued to be used through the centuries.
Fascinating!
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