Birth flower for May 22
Love-in-a-mist
Meaning: perplexity, a love in dreams
The name describes the blue flower sitting in a ruff of thread-thin bracts, as if wrapped in mist. After flowering it swells into a striped, horned balloon of a pod packed with black seeds, and Nigella comes from the Latin for black. The dried pods are popular in arrangements, and seeds of its cousin Nigella sativa are the spice known as black cumin.