I don't know about you, but one of the
things I appreciate most in a plant, that is, if I'm going to be expending
the effort to plant and cultivate it, is enthusiasm.
That's why the Yellow Flag Iris, iris
pseudacorus is one of my all-time favorites. In fact, this iris
shows so much enthusiasm that it's considered an invasive nuisance in some
areas. More on this later, first a little background:
HISTORY
Yellow Flags are most probably the
flower represented by the fleur-de-lis a design that dates back to Ancient
Mesopotamia, over six thousand years ago. I say "probably" because
there exists a school of thought that says the fleur-de-lis was, in fact,
a lily. However, even though the design we know today bears little
resemblance to either plant, one has to recall that photography was not
highly advanced six millenniums past. A pressed and dried iris
pseudacorus, on the other hand, looks quite a lot like a fleur-de-lis in
its flattened state. Further, the fleur-de-lis is most often found
in heraldry on a blue background, symbolizing water, where the plant
thrives. While some claim the
French term fleur-de-lis came from fleur-de-lys, or flower of the lily, I
think its more likely to have originated from the name of the French river
Lis.
In the twelfth century, either King
Louis VI or King Louis VII (sources disagree) became the first French
monarch to use the fleur-de-lis on his shield. There are lots of
pretty little stories about how this came to be. The most credible,
in my mind, is that King Louis VI or King Louis VII found his army trapped
and outnumbered, where they had been driven to the shore of a large lake.
Seeing a continuous band of iris that
stretched across the lake at one point, Louis VI (or VII if you’re a
stickler for detail) realized that the band represented an area where the
water wasn’t so deep and his army made its escape by that route.
Indeed, Yellow Flags do not grow in water depths much greater than about
10 inches (25 cm.) Needless to say, this bit of horticultural savvy
earned Louis Six or Seven an extremely high approval rating when he
returned back home, and he rewarded the flower by pasting fleurs-de-lis
about willy-nilly.
If you don’t care to believe that
story, there are others, as I say, mostly involving God delivering a
blue-backed fleur-de-lis flag to Louis in person.
