wednesday, march 22, 2006
An interlude for a yellow flower
As part of an assignment for Malaise and Melancholy class, I went on a walk to the middle of nowhere, ostensibly to retrieve some of the things I made last quarter in the pottery shack — better known as West Campus Kilns (or so the hand-painted sign on the plywood says). The easiest way to get there is along the bike path to the Francisco Torres dorms, which does not have many pedestrians, or much at all except non-native plant species.
The first things I noticed as I walked along were the bunches of yellow wildflowers at my feet — the same ones my girl friend and I called “sour-root” when we were seven or eight because the end of a plucked flower tastes sour if you nibble on it. I demonstrated this to Max while we waited for the bus going to the Museum of Natural History one Saturday morning — he was suitably impressed, and then I put the flower in my hair, where it promptly wilted. The flower’s real name is the Bermuda Buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae), and it is actually a weed from South Africa.
It looks like this:
comments (2)
Yes, Britta, the tang comes from oxalic acid, a neurotoxin.
– Hobart on 4/5/2006 11:58:22
haha, awesome! oh well.
– britta on 4/5/2006 15:51:54
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