Scilla's Serendipity

Last week on one of my walks, I discovered this delightful blue flower in a neighborhood cemetery here in our Hannover neck of the woods. Not having a clue what it was, I snapped several photos to show later to Uschi, our landlady.

Then I started concentrating on all the gravestones that looked exactly alike. Hundreds of them side-by-side in rows. Some were so weathered you couldn't see any engravings at all. The ones I could see were in an Old English script hard to read. But I could at least see the dates, most of which ended in the 1913-15 range.


So, of course, I jumped to conclusions and just assumed these were gravestones of soldiers who had died in WWI. Made sense to me!

Wrong! But that's getting ahead of my story.

Shortly after returning to the apartment from my walk, Uschi rang the doorbell with a CD in her hand. "I want you to see some photos of SCILLA," she said. They had recently visited one of Hannover's larger cemeteries over by the train station and saw the lawns covered with these tiny blue flowers: Scilla, a perennial herb in the hyacinth family. She was so excited about them she wanted me to go see them. So then I said, "I think I may have just taken pictures of them myself at the cemetery down the street. Are they these?" And I got out my camera (I hadn't even uploaded them yet onto the laptop!) and showed her my photos. YES. Scilla!

And then she explained to me that all those gravestones were for deaconess women who were employed at Hannover's Henrietten Stift hospital and died, most at a young age. Not soldiers of the war. But lying in peace...in Scilla.

Scilla everywhere, strutting their stuff on Uschi's camera and mine. Scilla in her cemetery; Scilla in mine. I swear, that was one happy Scilla flower, just wanting to be discovered and shared!

Photo courtesy of Uschi, our landlady.