Then we had the irises,
rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks,
like blown glass,
like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve,
and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, ...
Margaret Atwood
... never a worry or a sorrow that has not been offset by a purple iris.
...that swimming, sloping, elusive something
about the
dark bluish tint of the iris
which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests
where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...
Vladimir Nabokov
