Crocuses

There was this story of Enid Blyon's I reada long time back..... it was about how crocuses came to be. Blyton, in her singularly creative way, spun a gossamer story of how a gnome would take a pot of gold from a certain tree trunk and then spend every night counting all the gold he had.

One night he refused to let in a poor, hungry and sick fellow gnome for he did not want the other to know of his hoard. And though the sick gnome was saved, our friend the rich gnome felt very guilty of choosing wealth over his fello'ws life and asked the fairy queen to suggest a fitting retribution. And the fairy queen asked him to take all his gold and fling it into the country side. The now gold-less gnome dutifully did just that. And when spring came, he saw that the land was full of new blooms, golden in colour and breathtakingly beaytiful to behold. The blooms that sprung from the gold he threw away.

What a confection of imagination!!!! To this day, the remotest reference to crocuses reminds me of this. It was specially glorious to see the country cousins of the crocus ( or at least, thats what they appeared to me like) growing in vast bushes all the way between pune and kolhapur!!!

Did you know, that saffron is the yield of the crocus???? Gold or not, crocuses, even if not created that magically, have given us the gift of something divine!!!