FOR ANNE SAYWELL, A BIT OF BIRD’S-EYE SPEEDWELL OR VERONICA PERSICA)

Blue-eyed Veronica

Today is a balmy February day, much like spring (72 degrees), and the sudden birth of flowers assures me that we’re going to enjoy the last weeks of our Louisiana sojourn. One of the small, winsome plants that have appeared near our home is thriving in a pasture for horses across Darby Lane here in New Iberia, Louisiana. 

“It’s probably too small to mention because it isn’t dramatic enough,” my botanist friend Vickie Sullivan declared. But I like this tiny blue flower called Veronica persica (Bird’s-eye Speedwell) because it isn’t a “show-off” plant. Linnaeus named the plant after St. Veronica, who appears in early Christian legends as pitying Christ on the way to Calvary and wipes his face with her handkerchief, which then receives a miraculous true image of his features.

Veronica persica has been naturalized in the US from Eurasian sources, and it seems to like horses because it grows almost under horse’s hooves near the golf club on Darby Lane. The sight of it causes me to lighten up a bit today. Yesterday, my dear British friend, Anne Saywell, passed into the “Also World” (as Sister Elizabeth of Convent of St. Mary calls the hereafter), and I was sad most of the day. 

I recently wrote a blog and published a photo of Anne Saywell that showed her in a beautiful sweater she knitted. Anne was someone I befriended in 1974 while living in Ahwaz, Iran, and we kept in touch for almost fifty years. I can’t say I “kept up with” because Anne and her friend, Maureen Allchin seemed to always be aboard cruise ships. They spent several months doing an “around the world” tour during the last decade of Anne’s life. A trip to Bulkington, Wiltshire in England was on my bucket list when Anne suddenly developed stomach pain, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died 24 days after diagnosis.

I’m publishing Vickie Sullivan’s photograph of the beautiful tiny flower mentioned above as a small tribute to Anne Saywell, an outstanding executive in the administration of Girl Guides in England, a talented craftswoman and gardener who loved fun and games and blessed her friends with enchanting wit. She also possessed a gracious plenty of loyalty to anyone she befriended during her long life. I hope she has a good view of the Veronica persica from her new perch in the “Also World.”

 

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan