Columbine … Official (and favorite) Colorado Flower

My Mother would often find old sheet music at estate sales and bring it home for me to play on the piano.  As a result, I have a stack of music that is great fun to look through. A few days ago, I was looking through the stack and ran across this piece, Where the Columbines Grow.

Little did I know back in those days that I would eventually settle in Colorado, now for 33.5 years.  Columbines are one of my favorite flowers.  While most of the Columbines are now gone from my garden, I can enjoy photos all year-long.

“Where the Columbines Grow” is one of the two official state songs of Colorado. It was written and composed by A.J. Fynn, and was adopted on May 8, 1915. In the early to mid-2000s, there was debate over replacing “Where the Columbines Grow” with John Denver‘s “Rocky Mountain High” or Merle Haggard‘s rare song “Colorado”. In 2007, the Colorado legislature named “Rocky Mountain High” as Colorado’s second official state song, paired with “Where the Columbines Grow”.^[1]

Lyrics

Where the snowy peaks gleam in the moonlight,

Above the dark forests of pine,

And the wild foaming waters dash onward,

Toward lands where the tropic stars shine;

Where the scream of the bold mountain eagle

Responds to the notes of the dove

Is the purple robed West, the land that is best,

The pioneer land that we love.

Tis the land where the columbines grow,

Overlooking the plains far below,

While the cool summer breeze in the evergreen trees

Softly sings where the columbines grow.

The bison is gone from the upland,

The deer from the canyon has fled,

The home of the wolf is deserted,

The antelope moans for his dead,

The war whoop re-echoes no longer,

The Indian’s only a name,

And the nymphs of the grove in their loneliness rove,

But the columbine blooms just the same. Let the violet brighten the brookside,

In sunlight of earlier spring,

Let the fair clover bedeck the green meadow,

In days when the orioles sing,

Let the goldenrod herald the autumn,

But, under the midsummer sky,

In its fair Western home, may the columbine bloom

Till our great mountain rivers run dry.

History and Lyrics from Wikipedia

1.  Wolf, Jeffrey (March 13, 2007). “Lawmakers name ‘Rocky Mountain High’ second state song”. KUSA-TV (Denver).