Egyptians creatively extracted exotic perfume from dried iris rhizomes (called orris root), which are incidentally also used to flavor gin. Please note how appropriately viscous that word is, how it sticks faithful like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth. Greek and Roman apothecaries prescribed iris seeds for ancients with indigestion, and unguents of iris were slathered onto battle wounds. 112 t6869 (in 1886) by Matilda Smith (Wikipedia) Illustration of Iris kashmiriana Baker for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol. Traversing the yawn of centuries they have covered great distances leaving their petal prints on history, tradition, medicine, cosmetology, commerce and more. Hardy and international in spirit, irises thrive in a variety of terrains semi-desert land, rocky mountain ridges, grassy slopes, meadows, bogs, and riverbanks. We must not hold this against them (people who live in glass houses etc). Any iris who thinks otherwise labors prettily under a delusion. In other words the iris is a community, not an individual. In truth that which we call an iris is not a flower at all, but a fan-shaped inflorescence–a small tribe of flowers arranged on a common stem (hilariously called the peduncle). Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves. … We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Perhaps this is because they cradle memories of their ancestors, who fell asleep in autumnal earth as knobbly rhizomes or bulbous bulbs, only to dream and wake some seasons later, tall, slender, studded with purple possibilities, and brandishing green leaves like pirate swords. Unlike many mortals, irises are not unsettled by dramatic changes in circumstance. Yet this turn of events does little to disturb an iris’s equanimity. Its erstwhile home is gone, irretrievable, like misspent youth or last Wednesday’s sunset. An iris outside its bud is suddenly adrift. Take a sheaf home, place it in a glass vase and by morning, from poised purple-tipped silence, spill sepals and petals frothy with filaments and ruffles, loquacious little fountains self-released into sunshine, suddenly aware of the greater world.Īn iris in a bud understandably assumes the bud is the world. In grocery stores budded irises are bundled together, like perfectly sharpened purple-pointed pencils, like slender indigo-edged spears, like a quiver of Spring arrows poised to unbend unhappy bents of mind. Where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns,Īnd where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born. Which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests
That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris
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