Love Lies Bleeding

I'm always fascinated by the weird things that just pop into my head, generally at the oddest times. Yesterday morning while doing some sweeping it was love lies bleeding. What? Why?

The first thing that comes to my mind for Love Lies Bleeding is the plant, Amaranthus caudatus. I've been intrigued by its long strings of blooms but I've never tried to grow this annual. And I am definitely intrigued by its common name.
Its genus name, Amaranthus, comes from the Greek, amarantos, which means unfading. Caudatus means, with a tail.


Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding is also a song on Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album.
In the Victorian language of flowers, Love Lies Bleeding represented hopeless or unrequited love.

When I googled the words this old 1948 detective novel, from the golden age of detective fiction, showed up. Oh how I would love to find a copy of this to read. Gervase Fen (don't you just love that name?) was a Professor of English at Oxford who solved the case of a missing Shakespeare manuscript in one weekend.

While I have no idea what made the term pop into my mind, when I try to explicate it, I think about the times my children got hurt: Doug when he wrecked his bike and tore up his leg; Kari when she fell down the basement steps and cut open her head; Preston when he put his arm through the storm door and cut it so badly.

For a mother, there's nothing scarier than seeing her loves lie bleeding.