A RARE PLANT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 20 November 1928, Page 3

A RARE PLANT.

FAMOUS IN GREEK LEGEND

ACCLIMATISED FROM ITALY

At the close of the Classical Association meeting Mr Willi Fels, the vicepresident, showed some blooms of asphodel from a plant 'which ho had gathered from the hills slopes of Taormina, in Sicily, close to the famous GraecoItonion theatre, over live vears ago, says the Otago “Daily Times!” “■Shelley,” said Air .Pels, “in his poem of the sensitive plant speaks of the fabulous asphodel. Here are a few flowery of the asphodel, famous in Greek legend, as the plants connected with the dead and the underworld. Homer describes them as covering the great meadows, which the dead passed on their way to the Acheron, the river to be crossed, to reach the realm of Hades and Persephone. McPhail translates a passage in the last book of the Odyssey, viz.: ‘The spirits of the dead led by Hermes, went past the gateways of the sun, and past the town of dreams and reached anon, the mead of Asphodel, inhabited, by spirits, phantoms of the dead and gone.’ According to another version the asphodel meadows wore the beauty of the spirits of the dead, where Minos held court and sat in judgment. The connection of the asphodel with death is due perhaps to the dull greenish colour of its leaves, its yellowish, or terracotta coloured flowers, which suggest the gloom of the underworld and the pallor of death. Persephone is presented .sometimes with a garland of asphodel. There are varieties of asphodel in the countries of the Mediterranean. The plant in my garden I dug out in February, 1923, .from the hill of the ,Graeeo-T?omnn theatre in Taormina, in Sicily. It took five years before the plant was acclimatised here and it bears flowers for the first time now. They grow on a stem three to four feet high, and belong to .the order of the Liliaeeae. The name asphodel was .changed into alfodil, and one of our favourite spring flowers, the narcissus. our ‘daffodil,’ was named after it!”