Discovery and discovery. I am no botanist, so you'll have to forgive my stumbling attempts at plant identification, and you'll have to indulge my pleasure when I seem to have done so. Libby and I came upon this lovely flowering plant at the end of the day on our last trip to Roundrock. We were hiking up the creekbed looking for spots where we could plant the last few shortleaf pines we had and I saw something low to the ground, next to the standing water in the streambed. (Standing water here is rare. Generally there isn't any water in the streambed, and if it is there, it is flowing. But at this point the bedrock breaks the surface of the ground -- or the soil has washed away to the bedrock more correctly -- and the water can't drain into the earth, so it sits there in a couple of pools.) Amidst the greens, grays, and browns of the palette was a splash of the lightest lavender. These flowers rewarded my eye. I stepped off the deer path we were following and into the grassy area beside the creek then bent low to examine a ground-flowering plant. These flowers were at the end of a long stalk that was laying on the grass. That seemed odd to me until I realized that the flow of water through here had clearly pushed the stalk to the ground and that under normal circumstances, the stalk of flowers would be rising into the air, in this case more than a foot tall. I was pleased by the subtle lavender color just as I was pleased to find yet another new flower in my forest. But what was this new flower? I was eager to get home so I could try identifying it on the Missouri Flora webpage that I rely on for most of my flower detective work. And when we got home, and in ensuing days, I did try to identify the flower there. But with no luck. This webpage is organized by the colors of the flowers. Fool that I am, I kept foraging through the blue/purple flowers section, trying to spot anything that matched the flowers in the photograph I had taken. Despite renewed attempts, hoping to see what I might have overlooked before, I had no luck. This made me wonder if perhaps the new flower I had delighted in finding so much might not be a Missouri native, in which case it shouldn't be at Roundrock. (I am not so heartless that I would yank up such a lovely were it lacking citizenship papers, but I would be more pleased about it if I knew that it truly belonged in my forest.) More than a week of failure passed, but then I finally hit upon the obvious. I should look in the white flowers section of the webpage. And, I found it. My little lavender lovely is Camassia scilloides, or wild hyacinth (sometimes referred to as Atlantic camas as well). And it is a native to the great state of Missouri. Apparently the First Peoples as well as early settlers in the region would eat the bulbs of this plant (though I have no intention of doing so). The preferred growing conditions for the plant matched where I had found it in my woods, and everything seemed right with the world. So it was a double win for old Pablo! (This is the part where I ask you indulgence.) Hyacinth, as I'm sure you know, was a Greek youth beloved by Apollo who was killed when a discus thrown by Apollo was blown awry (by that jealous Zephyrus). Rather than see Hyacinth lost to the god Hades, Apollo resurrected the boy as a beautiful flower. Some scholars believe that the flower referred to in the mythology was actually an iris rather than the hyacinth we all know. On my next trip to Roundrock, I intend to sit beside the creek where I found my wild hyacinth and contemplate these things. Missouri calendar:

• Bobolinks migrate from Argentina and some nest in northern Missouri.

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