Hyacinth 🌿

Hyacinth walked up to you and blundered right into your butt. It seemed her floppy ears were covering her eyes as she looked down.

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Hyacinthus orientalis, the common hyacinth, garden hyacinth or Dutch hyacinth, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Scilloidiae, native to southwestern Asia, southern and central Turkey, northwestern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. It was introduced to Europe in the 16th century. It is widely cultivated everywhere in the temperate world for its strongly fragrant flowers which appear exceptionally early in the season, and frequently forced to flower at Christmas time.[2]

It is a bulbous plant, with a 3–7 cm diameter bulb. The leaves are strap-shaped, 15–35 cm long and 1–3 cm broad, with a soft, succulent texture, and produced in a basal whorl. The flowering stem is a raceme, which grows to 20–35 cm (rarely to 45 cm) tall, bearing 2–50 fragrant purple flowers 2–3.5 cm long with a tubular, six-lobed perianth.

In Greek mythology, Hyakinthos was a young man admired by Apollo and Zephyr, but killed by a discus in a jealous fight between the two gods; a flower was allegedly named after him when it sprang from his blood. However, Theophrastus describes both a cultivated and a wild plant called ὑάκινθος (hyakinthos), neither of which are considered to be the modern hyacinth.[3]