Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air*

by chuckofish

Earlier this summer I signed up for a ‘flower CSA’ run by a colleague’s entrepreneurial eleven-year-old daughter. She lives on a farm where there is plenty of space for flower-growing. I think it was a clever business idea, and she is doing a great job. The weekly bouquet has proved a wonderful morale booster. Last week I received this pretty bunch,

and here is the one that I picked up today:

I confess that I cannot identify most of the flowers, and I know that my arranging style is probably best described as chaotic, but I love the way they brighten up a room. Honestly, I’d rather participate in a flower CSA than a vegetable one. We’ve done that before but gave up because we mostly received unidentifiable greens. What can I say? I am not fond of kale.

In other news, I found out that our great aunt and uncles – Dora (age 10), Kenneth (age 9) and Thomas (age 7) Cameron – went from South Africa to the poorhouse in Dundee Scotland, which they entered on July 19th, 1870. Our great-grandfather Daniel ended up in similar straits but in Edinburgh, presumably because he was 13 (I posted about him back in 2013). Here’s the front of the Dundee poorhouse which was a much larger complex of buildings than this photo suggests.

I suspect that the younger children went to Dundee because it’s in Forfar, and that’s where their mother came from. If so, they arrived only to discover that the family couldn’t take them, didn’t live there anymore, or had all died out. At any rate, the children didn’t stay in Dundee for long, for they appear in the 1871 census living in Kilmallie, Argyll with two spinster sisters, Elizabeth and Mary McColl. All of this raises several questions. Thomas was not the son of our great grandfather who died in 1861. What happened to his father, and why did Thomas go by Cameron? Did Ann’s second husband have the same surname as our great grandfather? Was there no second husband? Also, I find it interesting that the children ended up in Kilmaillie, their father’s birthplace. Could the spinster ladies have been related to his mother? Perhaps they were aunts. It’s all an intriguing mystery. I’ll keep digging…

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some ‘ancestral mathematics’ to consider.

Food for thought… Have a great weekend!

*Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.