flowers

[Kirstini]

No: HPFGUIDX 72241

Chris wrote:
> we have: Bellatrix, Andromeda, Narcissa, and Nymphadora.
all of which are names of flowers. Harry's mother and aunt, are also 
named after flowers.  Lilly and Petunia.  Is there a connection 
here?  could they too be related to the blacks!?  COULD HARRY BE 
RELATED TO THE BLACKS!?> 

And Elli replied:
> Those names also belong to other people or goddesses, I believe. I 
think <snip> The person with the flower name I'm interested in is 
Moaning Myrtle. Don't know if it's been mentioned here before, but I 
wonder if she could be related somehow. > 

Now me (Kirstini): 
Bellatrix, Andromeda and Nymphadora are all names of stars, like 
Sirius (dog star). Are they flowers too? Or just seperate varieties 
of bred flower given mythical names?
 I always thought that "Narcissa" was picked becasue it connoted 
narcissism rather than a daffodil (still, daffodil=yellow=Aryan 
blonde). And I can't help but wonder if she had already been named, 
and GoF already out, before JKR thought of giving her dog-star 
similarly-monikered relatives. Perhaps Bellatrix was orignially going 
to be called Belladonna <eg> ?
 Don't stop at Moaning Myrtle, by the way. What about *Pansy* 
Parkinson? *Lavender* Brown? *Parvati* and *Padma* Patil (someone 
mentioned pre-OoP that both of these meant "water lily" or "orchid". 
Can't remember which), and of course, *Fleur* Delacour, who must be 
related to the Evans-Blacks because her name covers *all* flowers, 
right? Oh no. She's not a pure-blood. And Lavender Brown is probably 
Muggle-born (like Dean Thomas, she didn't know what the Grim meant). 
It can be really easy to take this sort of thing too far. I think the 
flower theme is really just an easy way to cover lots of character 
names without making any of them have any more significance than the 
rest, because they span such a disparate group that really the only 
thing you can say about them all is that they're all female.
  Who knows. Maybe flowers will turn out to bethe key to decoding the 
prophecy. Maybe the Dark Lord suffers from hayfever...
  I do love that "Albus Dumbledore" means "white flower", though. 
Nice little bit of early-morning gender mixing there. Cheers for 
that, Steve.
Kirstini