Earrings of the Queen

    Here are a couple of plant stories. I was sitting on the curb outside my girlfriend's apartment last week and her neighbor, Eleutheria, came by with these weeds in her hand that didn't have flowers, but which had big triangular seed pods at the end of each stem which made the weeds look kind of beautiful to me and I guess to her too. Eleutheria said the plant is native to Greece, where she was born, and that the king and queen of Greece had stolen a lot of the state treasury and fled the country shortly before the invasion of the Nazis in World War Two. The queen had always wanted the earrings of Marie Antoinette, though she never quite got them. Anyway, after the war, the king and queen wanted to come back and the Greek people said, "No," and so the king and queen were without a country. I don't know if the plant  got the name, "Earrings of the Queen," because of that event or not, but my guess is it was called that beforehand, because the queen had in fact thrown away the right to call the weed hers when she escaped the country with treasury money at the hour of greatest need. I told the story to my coworker, El, and she really liked the story and she told me she likes to go with her friends when they go wine-tasting, because rosemary always grows in the vineyards in the Napa Valley and she finds the smell of the rosemary wonderful to rub on her hands, because of the differences in light and soil and moisture and location that the rosemary grows in. I do not lie. Anyway, that's my plant stories.