Celestial blue

This is Pulmonaria longifolia - also known as the narrow-leaved lungwort. It's blooming today in my shady front yard, beneath the California coast live oaks. It's somewhat splashed with grit and sand from our last spate of rains, but its cheerful blue pops up at you from the woodsy floor.

"Lungwort" isn't a very pretty name for such a pretty flower, but it's an name that goes back to early times. The lightly fuzzed leaves of the lungwort are spotted with silver, and in medieval times they were thought to resemble diseased and ulcerated lungs. According to the principles of sympathetic magic, herbalists used the lungwort to treat respiratory illnesses.

Pulmonaria are cousins to other blue flowers, like forget-me-not and borage. In some varieties, the buds are pink, and after the flowers open they mature to a bright, clear blue. A cluster of flowers can be mixed, all sky-blue-pink like Uncle Wiggly!

Some named cultivars have been selected for their coloring - deep or light blue, or even white - or for particularly silvered leaves. Mine is named "Benediction," after Seattle gardener Loie Benedict. You can find other named varieties like "Roy Davidson" and "Bertram Anderson," but I have an affection for "Benediction" because it was introduced by the Seattle plantsman Jerry Flintoff, who was my Seattle neighbor. Its flowers, as you can see, are a particularly deep sky blue.

UPDATE: To answer MAYBELLINE in the comments: The folklore idea of "sympathetic magic" is that things influence what they resemble. So people thought tea from a leaf that looks like a sick lung can heal a lung, or because walnuts resemble brains, eating them makes you smart. Or, more sinisterly, if you harm a doll that looks like a certain person, it will harm the actual person.

I think the plant was named "lungwort" or "lungenkraut" or "that plant that heals lungs" first, and then the botanical name was coined after the folk name. Carl Linnaeus starting naming things in binomial nomenclature in the mid 18th century, and probably just latinized what people were already calling it - "The narrow-leaved version of that plant that [everybody thinks] heals lungs."