acanthus

Definition 
Acanthus comes from the Greek a (without) and canthos (cup), indicating that its upside-down flowers can't hold water, have no cups. There are at least two charming stories, neither verifiable, about how the spiny or toothed leaf of the Mediterranean blue-flowered plant Acanthus mollis gave the name acanthus to the architectural ornament resembling those leaves that is used in the famous Corinthian capital or column. One tale has it that the Greek architect Callimachus placed a basket of flowers on his young daughter's grave, and an acanthus sprang up from it. This touched him so deeply that he invented and introduced a design based on the leaves. Another story, from an early 18th-century book called The Sentiment of Flowers tells it this way:

The architect Callimachus, passing near the tomb of a young maiden who had died a few days before the time appointed for her nuptials, moved by tenderness and pity, approached to scatter some flowers on her tomb. Another tribute to her memory had preceded his. Her nurse had collected the flowers which should have decked her on her wedding day; and, putting them with the marriage veil, in a little basket, had placed it near the grave upon a plant of acanthus, and then covered it with a tile. In the succeeding spring, the leaves of the acanthus grew around the basket: but being stayed in their course by the projecting tile, they recoiled and surmounted its extremities. Callimachus, surprised by this rural decoration, which seemed the work of the Graces in tears, conceived the capital of the Corinthian column; a magnificent ornament still used and admired by the whole civilized world.