Historical Sampler – The Waspish Bee Gets it in the Neck, and Campanulas.

I’m just not happy with the waspish bee.

‘Tis the wrong shape for either a wasp or a bee. I don’t like the angle it sits at. I’m not happy with the colour patterning

(although Jane of Chilly Hollow NeedlePoint Adventures has since suggested turkey’ing each colour seperately to get a better pattern, I don’t want to do it for a third time, given the other problems)

and there is the basic problem that a wasp is shiny, not fluffy.

 

---It had to go.---

 

I’m going to put a second one of Mrs Christie’s flowers in it’s place. (I debated a leaf, but it’s hard to get coverage of all the pen marks).

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I did wonder what sort of flower Mrs Christie’s flower was back in http://elmsleyrose.blogspot.com/2008/12/historical-sampler-old-flower-cultivars.html and put up a few possibles from Abraham Munting’s Decorative Flower Engravings – from the 1696 “Accurate Description of Terrestial Plants”.

Baroness Eowyn Amberdrake, of the SCA, suggested that the flower was possibly a campanula, one of my listed possibilities.

But were campanulas around during the 16th and 17thC in England? Were they used in decoration at all?

Here’s a Campanula Rotundifloria as seen today.

http://www.cvni.org/wildflowernursery/wildflowers/harebell

In the Medieval Flower Book by Celia Fisher, I found

The large campanula pictured in the illumination is a Campanula trachelium.

The flower shape match looks pretty good (although I did a raised centre, whereas it should have been a ‘throat’. Mrs Christie originally advised French Knots)

But were they around in England in the 16/17thC? The illuminations above are Italian and French.

I found both varieties listed at the “Elizabethan Flowers Database” http://home.netcom.com/~janeabbt/flowers/browse.html 

which lists flowers known in England in the 16th C.

Further, I found them listed at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/plants-fungi/postcode-plants/checklist-english-plants.html – a list of English native vascular plant species was compiled by Dr Chris Preston of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Monks Wood.

What about the other varieties of campanula listed?

They all have the same shaped flowers, but some appear in clusters of flowers and/or vary in size.

They are all of

Class:
Angiospermae (Angiosperms)

Subclass:
Dicotyledonae (Dicotyledons)

Superorder:
Asteridae (Daisy Superorder)

Order:
Campanulales (Bellflower Order)

Family:
Campanulaceae (Bellflower Family)

Genus:
Campanula (Bellflower)

Mrs Christie may have intended a generic flower, or some other flower entirely, but it is possible that she was using a campanula as the basis of her design.

Let’s be brave and say it’s a campanula.

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I’ll be playing with some tracing paper to find the size and placement of a second campanula.

Oh, and they come in blue-violet. It might be nice if I got the colour right this time.