The gift of flowers

We lived for five years in British Columbia before we moved back to Ontario. While we lived in B.C., my grandmother mailed me some iris rhizomes. She had two types of old fashioned irises which we dug up and moved back with us to Ontario. My grandmother passed away a while back, but I think of her every time "her" irises bloom. No matter how many spectacular modern hybrid irises I get, hers holds a special place in my heart.

This is the larger one, the other is yellow and I thought I had taken a picture of it, but I was obviously hallucinating.

Another flower that holds a place in my heart is my blue columbine. It's not a showy new hybrid, it's actually a wild flower in other parts of the country. Our local columbine is red and yellow.

How this "wild" blue columbine came to be in my garden is an interesting story that still makes me wonder. After we had moved back to Ontario, a very dear friend of ours, Lily,  mailed us a packet of seeds she had purchase while touring Butchart Gardens outside of Victoria. I read the packet instructions and very carefully followed them. Nothing germinated. I tried the alternative planting instructions. Nothing. After two years of trying I gave up and tossed the rest of the seeds in a patch of garden and proceeded to forget about them. A few years later, our friend Lily died. That same year, the blue columbines flowered. I think of her often, but she seems especially close when her flowers bloom.

Does anyone else have flowers that mean more to them than just how decorative and beautiful they are?
AT