Mala-Forget Me Not Flowers sa Neckar River?

These days, many “researchers” come to visit my blogsite to search for photos of forget me not flowers. I could only think of Gregorio Zaide who wrote that forget me not was Rizal’s fave and the flowers of Heidelberg must have reminded him of said flowers. I know it because I too researched on the same topic before shooting the Flowers of Heidelberg for my omnibus film, A mi Patria. By coincidence, during those days when I was researching, I saw forget-me-not flowers in bloom near the tomb of my parents at the Manila Memorial Park. All the forget me not photos in this site were taken there in fact. However, in my continued research, I found among the many books of my historian-brother the Pictorial Album on Rizal published in 1961 [Centennial Edition] which I used to browse when I was a kid. The book is still intact though silverfishes have already eaten some of its leaves. There I found a more plausible picture of the flowers of Heidelberg because the Neckar River could be seen in the background, and the flowers though taken from a higher angle are in the foreground. Unfortunately, it is in black and white [Will post the photo later as it is in my laptop]. I did not use any forget me not flower in my film at all.

Moreover, in an article posted by Dr. Penelope Flores last August 2011, she wrote that when she went to Heidelberg in Germany, he asked Mr. Rainer, a retired English, History, and Social and Political Studies teacher that she  wanted to know  what kind of flowers  Rizal  saw when he wrote the poem “To the Flowers of Heidelberg.”  Mr. Rainer drove her to Philosopher’s Way. “There,” he pointed, “Those were the flowers he saw.”  She looked at a wide expanse of blooms and saw what appeared to her were white “Cadena de amor.”  The roadside presented a painter’s palette of varied hues and texture.” [To read the full article, click day-11-of-three-perfect-days.html]

I used the picture above with Dr. Flores’ permission, and many pictures from the book Pictorial Album on Rizal extensively in my segment, Flowers of Heidelberg interpreted by Romalito Mallari in Filipino Sign Language [FSL].

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