Although there are not many floriculture lovers who have taken up the serious cultivation of cyclamen at home, its popularity among the people has been tested for centuries. After all, not every flower has so many names invented by its admirers: pork bread, earthen apple, dryad, earthen radish, winter gdula, theotokos grass.
The genus cyclamen belongs to the myrsinaceae family, but sometimes it is referred to as primroses (Primulaceae). It includes 20 flowering plants. Cyclamen is a common Latin name for all species, which was originally only a scientific term.
Why is cyclamen so called
I must say that opinions about the name are ambiguous, although everyone agrees with its Greek origin: kuklos means "circle, round". But some experts are convinced that this is due to the almost ideal rounded shape of the cyclamen tuber, while others believe that the plant's tendency to shed the flower after the flowering phase is to blame. In this case, the remaining part of the rim is twisted into a regular spiral.
But this is not all the options for interpreting the name of cyclamen. There is an assumption that the flower got its name because of a certain cyclicality, which it adheres to throughout its entire existence. The plant regularly fulfills its purpose: it appeared on the surface of the soil, dissolved its leaves, bloomed, left seeds and retired again. The cyclamen spends most of the year dormant underground, but flowering can be very long: 1, 5 - 3 months.
Contrary to generally accepted norms, when most flowering plants delight in lush color in spring and summer, cyclamen blooms most often in autumn and ends this period in March. For this feature, the ancient Greeks called it a flower that sleeps in summer. Cyclamen was endowed by the people with many other names, most of which are far from euphonious.
"Delicate girl's ear" or "pork bread"
It should be noted that when it comes to the flower itself, the most beautiful associations arise. Stefan Zweig noted the beauty of a blooming cyclamen in his novel Impatience of the Heart, comparing the shape of its flower to a gentle girl's ear. And wild-growing cyclamens growing in the mountains of Central Europe were named alpine violets. Although they have nothing to do with violets. Perhaps this is where the beautiful comparisons end, because folk wisdom reflects in the names the useful properties of the plant rather than its external beauty.
So, for the love of pigs for the poisonous tubers of cyclamen, the plant received several names: pork bread, pork potatoes, earthen bread. For the rounded shape of the cyclamen tuber is sometimes called an earthen apple or radish, flat-round tubers of some species are called "seal". It is clear that "winter gudula", because it blooms in the cold season, and the "Mother of God" - because it helps with many diseases.
Dryakhva-grass or Georgian dryakva - these are all the popular names for a medicinal plant, which is indispensable for reduced immunity, nervous disorders, purulent-inflammatory diseases of the upper respiratory tract, rheumatism, gout and many others. All this is due to the saponin (cyclamin) and glycosides that are contained in cyclamen tubers. Where the name "dryakva" came from today is difficult to restore, but in Georgia the first descriptions of the medicinal properties of these tubers date back to the 4th-3rd centuries BC. e. In modern pharmacy terminology, the name "duck's tuber" is also used.
