Columbine is a perennial common throughout Europe.
“The variety of the colors of these flowers are very much, for some are wholly white, some of a blue or violet color, others a bluish, of flesh color, or deep or pale red, or of a dead purple, or dead murrey color, as Nature listeth to show.”
John Parkinson (1567 1650)
A fourteenth-century manuscript recommended columbine drunk with ale to destroy the pestilence and drive out poisons, and Pseudo-Apuleius claimed that, “if anyone have with him this herb . . . he will not be barked at by dogs.”
The blossoms of the columbine have horn-shaped nectaries, which recall the common symbol for cuckoldry. Ophelia gives her columbines to the adulterous king.