POSIES: What’s your favorite flower? Most folks probably won’t mention forget-me-nots, but chances are the pretty blue blooms have caught your eye at some point in time.

In Newfoundland, it represents those who fell in World War I. The Alzheimer’s Society uses forget-me-nots as a symbol for memory loss and to raise awareness for the disease.

Farmers’ Almanac tells some German origin stories for the name of the petite perky posies.

“One describes a German knight who was strolling with his lady along the banks of the Danube river. The lady saw pretty blue flowers — but they’d been pulled loose by the river’s flow and were about to disappear downstream. She wanted to save the flowers, so her chivalrous knight jumped into the water. He couldn’t fight the strong current, so he tossed the flowers onto the bank, and as he was carried out to sea, he called out, vergiss mein nicht, which is German for ‘forget me not.’”

Not so, said a second legend.

“Another legend says that the German knight didn’t leap into the river after the flowers, but rather bent to pick some for his lady when the weight of his armor caused him to topple into the water — and then he called out ‘forget me not’ as he was swept away.

“A separate German tale says the name was chosen when God was naming flowers. This one was the last, and the flower cried out, ‘Forget me not, O Lord,’ to which God pronounced, ‘That shall be your name!’”

There are 74 different species of the flowers around the world, some of which have white and pink blooms.

The Myosotis alpestris, or the Alpine forget-me-not, is Alaska’s state flower — and it was named as such before Alaska became a state.