My favourite flowering image: the Yellow Star-of-Bethlehem (Gagea lutea)

Mary Traynor · 2026

Read My favourite flowering image: the Yellow Star-of-Bethlehem (Gagea lutea) by Mary Traynor (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13577753.txt.

Description

Mary Traynor shares a personal essay from 2026 on a flower she holds dear: the Yellow Star-of-Bethlehem. Her piece joins a journal series where plant lovers write about a favorite flowering image. Traynor pairs two views of the same plant from the same wood near Kendal, split by well over a century.

One view is a pressed specimen picked in Scroggs Wood in 1880 and kept in a herbarium. The other is a fresh photo taken in 2024 at the same spot. Traynor reflects on what the pairing stirs: the pull of old collections, the joy of return, and why this small spring flower moves her.

Catalog record

CREATORMary Traynor
YEAR2026
COLLECTIONPAPERS
FORMATTXT
FILE SIZE8 KB
VERSION1.0
LICENSECC BY 4.0
RIGHTSCC BY
SOURCEEurope PMC

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13577753

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