With this post, I am finally into flowers blooming on my actual property. My relationship with this flower goes back nearly three decades, when I used to walk down to a little fragment of fairly-unspoiled prairie about a half mile east of me. Grass widows covered a hillside on the way down to the river. One day in early April, a huge pile of dirt was dumped in this spot--the property owner was about to dig the foundation for a house right in the middle of native prairie. Dozens of clumps of these were poking up through the fill dirt, and I thought... what the heck. I assumed that there was little chance that they'd live, but they would be dead for sure within days if I left them, so I got ten clumps, and moved them to a few spots on my property that had not-really-yet become a prairie restoration project. They all lived. And every Spring I have taken the fattest clumps here and divided them into 2-3 smaller clumps, and planted those. They seed and spread themselves all over as well. Now I have hundreds.
While it is generally true that scientific names for plants are more stable than "common names," this is not the case with Grass widows. They were Sisyrinchium douglasii for years, until the official name was changed recently based on DNA evidence, but we still call them "rinkies." Out of hundreds of blooms, nearly all will be that lovely pink color, but rarely you will see a white bloom like this one. Until last week, I hadn't seen this one bloom here for years.
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