72 Tall Bearded Iris 



O beautiful! beautiful flower! 

 The ward of the sunbeam and shower 

 In garments of woven delight, 

 Of the sunset, Aurora and light. 

 While over thy beauty there plays 

 Such blending of color and shade, 

 Such delicate tinting and rays, 

 Well becoming a heavenly maid. 

 Ethereal lovely and sweet, 

 Thy presence we joyously greet. 



Thy mother, fair Iris, in beauty supreme, 

 Took all her rich fabrics of loveliest sheen, 

 The robes of the rainbow, flower garden of air, 

 Of bewildering beauty, resplendently fair, 

 And made for her child such a dazzling dress 

 No daughter of royalty e'er could possess. 



Harrison: The Iris. 



FLEUR-DE-LIS. The golden device which was 

 on the flag of royal France as far back as, at least, 

 the latter part of the fifth century, when Clovis the 

 First was King of France until the downfall of Louis 

 Philippe (1848), is claimed by some to have been 

 modeled after the Iris; by some, after the lily; by 

 some, after the Egyptian lotus; by some, after the 

 toad or frog; by others, that it is a mere arbitrary 

 design. At first the figures were scattered over the 

 field in the twelfth century the field was white 

 and of no fixed number, but about the middle of the 

 fourteenth century they were reduced to three, the 

 mystical church number Charles V then definitely 





