Columbine — Chambers's Encyclopaedia

A detailed botanical illustration of a Common Columbine (Aquilegia Vulgaris). The drawing shows a single, slender, upright stem with several small, lanceolate leaves at the base and along the stem. The stem terminates in a cluster of five large, bell-shaped flowers. Each flower has five distinct, pointed sepals that are slightly recurved at the tips. The flowers are shown in various stages of development, from buds to fully opened blossoms. The illustration is rendered in a fine-line, etched style typical of 19th-century botanical texts. — Common Columbine (*Aquilegia Vulgaris*).

Columbine (Aquilegia), a genus of Ranunculaceæ, with five coloured sepals, which soon fall off, and five petals each terminating below in a horn-shaped nectary. The name (from Lat. columba, 'a dove') is derived from the resemblance of the flower to a cluster of doves, of which the convergent nectaries suggest the heads and necks, and the divergent sepals the fluttering wings. They are natives of the temperate and colder regions of the northern hemisphere. One, the Common Columbine (A. vulgaris), is found in woods in some parts of Britain, and has long been familiar as an inmate of flower-gardens. It is a perennial, generally 2 to 3 feet high, with flowers of considerable beauty. Columbine was formerly much esteemed for medicinal virtues, which are now seldom heard of.—Some of the other species are very ornamental, and are pretty common in flower-borders.