Thursday, January 28, 2010
Scotland's national plant is the thistle. It shows up a lot in Scottish art work and they grow profusely in the terrain. There's a funny wee story as to how it actually became the national plant. It's very widely known and most likely has some truth to it.
In the days when the Vikings roamed the seas, one of their favorite places to raid was Scotland. There are a lot of places of the coasts that have Viking connections, especially on the northers shores of Scotland. The story goes that, centuries ago, a band of Scotsmen were sleeping in the woods somewhere when an army of Vikings discovered them. The Vikings had this idea to sneak up on them unawares and kill them in their sleep. The began to take off their shoes to make their approach as quiet as possible. Unfortunately for the Vikings, they were standing in a huge patch of thistles and they stepped on them, crying out and alerting the Scots of their presence so that the attack didn't go the way they had thought at first. So it's a funny wee story as ye can see, but there are many others like it in history so I see no reason why it shouldn't be true!