While hiking around Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway (a beauty that deserves its own blog post, coming up next), I saw a sign inviting visitors to make their own wildflower crowns, and decided to join in the fun.
Our nature guide/crown-making instructor demonstrated how to make one, and then sent us off scampering in a meadow filled with buttercups, orchids, daisies, and yellow flowers that looked like dandelions but were called something else (which I’ve forgotten…). Here is my work of art.
Also at the event was a delightful father-daughter duo who lived nearby, Patrick and 11-year old Eva. But Patrick didn’t just chauffeur his daughter here; he was all in on the project himself. The plan was for each of them to make a crown. But we quickly found out that crown-making wasn’t as easy as our nature guide made it look. (We agreed to pretend that our fumble-fingers were due to the blustery winds…) So they decided to just focus on Eva’s crown. I gave him mine, in exchange for a picture of the two of them.
One of the joys of travel is meeting random strangers (and now Facebook friends) like Patrick and Eva, and sharing an absolutely delightful time with them in a far away land. I think they are perfect candidates to represent Northern Ireland in my Faces of the World series. (When I told Patrick that, his answer was: “I’m not sure how Northern Ireland will feel about that….”)
Below is what the finished product was supposed to look like, as modeled by our nature guide Cliff. I think mine was more like a wreath than a crown. I got a kick out of the way his looked like it could be a bird’s nest–I expected one of the meadow pipits to alight on his head any minute!
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