For this week’s Monday color, we rely on the brilliance of Aconitum blossoms, otherwise known by a zillion different names such as monkshood, wolf’s bane, devil’s bane, Queen of All Poisons, and flake attractor, the last of which is my own, coined after seeing the woo-related claims and usages for the plant that can be found online. While purported to have countless different properties over the centuries, the only two that can be supported with any accuracy are a) that the plant is toxic to a fair degree, and b) the flowers are usually colorful. Many medicinal claims have been made for species throughout the botanical kingdom, and most are anecdotal at best; despite the avowals of numerous naturopathic and mystic flakes, science has not ignored such claims at all, but has tested the majority of them under controlled conditions (meaning, not subject to subjectivity, small sample sizes, and the placebo effect.) The few that actually showed dependable results, like salicylic acid and quinine, quickly became known as, “medicine.” Thus, when you hear phrases such as, “alternative medicine,” or, “traditional medicine,” these can easily be translated to, “not even close to medicine.” Just a little pointer to save you some time.
I’ve shown these flowers before (twice,) but both of those times were in bright sunlight conditions; this time around, it was overcast, so the color is coming courtesy of the flash, which did a much better job of it I think. Taken at the same time as this post just a couple weeks back, I didn’t try to shoot them in the overcast light to show what the effect on the colors would be – most likely, the slow shutter speed would have made the images not very impressive anyway. We’ll stick with this one.