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Why Iris?

They are Joan's favourite flower: Joan and Stan grow them in their own garden.   The following text has been partially replicated from these existing websites: Iris Germanica The Goddess of the Rainbow

Next time you meet the glorious colors, curves, and scent of an iris flower, look carefully. This is a plant recognized for millennia to have special meanings and benefits for humans. Iris was the Greek Goddess of the Rainbow, the messenger of Zeus and Hera, and was depicted as "A radiant maiden borne in swift flight on golden wings. Among her duties was that of leading the souls of dead women to the Elysian fields, and as a token of that faith the Greeks planted purple iris on the graves of women" according to Hollingsworth in his Flower Chronicles. Her symbol, the many-colored rainbow - the refraction of sunlight coming through rain - was always seen as a sign of vitality and happiness. We also use this word for the 'window' of the eye; the colored doorway to the messages that sight brings. Ancient Egyptians decorated their scepter with an iris, said to represent faith, wisdom and valor. The Romans devoted the iris to their goddess Juno, and used the flowers in ceremonies of purification. The Iris Florentina (Il Giaggiolo) is the official flower of Florence, Italy, the city named for its flowers at the height of the Roman Empire. Iris have long been cultivated alongside olive trees in Tuscany. While the purple flowers have a scent of violets, the bulbs of the Iris Florentina supply the local perfume industy. From the Middle Ages, English and French carried the iris on their coat of arms - the flower-de-luce or fleur-de-lys. Rainbows have inspired the greatest writers and poets of our times. The following is exerpted from "The Rainbow" by D.H. Lawrence. "... she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. "And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. "And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven."

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