Time the Revelator (CD cover detail)
Gillian Welch wrote a song about a flower she calls the Acony Bell. Like most of Welch’s songs, it’s great — beautifully performed and written. The lyrics describe the flower in terms so detailed and specific, they remind me of the kind of formal botanical descriptions you find in guidebooks and taxonomic encyclopedias.
The flower itself has always been elusive. Early attempts by botanists to study it were frustrated by the fact that the flower is rare, hard to grow, and is found naturally only in a small geographical range way up in the mountains running through Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The plant was so elusive that it was eventually “discovered by a man who didn’t name it, named for a man who didn’t see it, by someone who didn’t know where it was,” according to an article in Harvard Magazine.
In a way, Gillian Welch has added another chapter to this long history of confusion. My first attempt at Googling the flower was frustrated because its name is usually spelled Oconee Bell, not Acony Bell as Welch had it on her CD. To help you along in your own research, here’s some information about the Oconee Bell, also known as Shortia galacifolia.
Well it makes its home amid the rocks and the rills
Where the snow lies deep on the windy hills
And it tells the world “Why should I wait?
This ice and snow’s gonna melt away.”
J. Dan Pittillo @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database