Flower Power

Consider the [fuschias of Ireland], how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

I took this photo in the summer of 2005 in a garden of a B&B just outside Omagh (County Tyrone), Northern Ireland, a town made famous by a 1998 car bombing by an Irish Republican Army splinter group calling themselves the Real Irish Republican Army. One August day, the RIRA detonated five hundred pounds of explosives in a car parked in a busy shopping area. Twenty-nine people were killed and more than three hundred were injured in this the worst single terrorist attack in Northern Ireland. It took ten years for the city of Omagh officials and some of the victims' families to reconcile their conflict over the appropriate wording and placement of a memorial plaque.