in Thoreau’s Journal

The blue flag, Iris versicolor. Its buds are a dark, indigo-blue, beyond the green calyx…its fringed, re-curved parasols over its anthers, and its variously streaked and colored petals…it belongs to the meadow and ornaments it much.

Ever it will be some obscure, small, and modest flower that will most please us.

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June 12, 1853 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The leaf of the rattlesnake plantain now surprises the walker amid the dry leaves on cool hill-sides of the woods;

of very simple form, but richly veined with longitudinal and transverse white veins. It looks like art.