in Thoreau’s Journal:

The blue flag (Iris versicolor). Its buds are a dark indigo-blue tip beyond the green calyx. It is rich but hardly delicate and simple enough; a very handsome sword-shaped leaf. The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beautiful of flowers. It might have been famous from Proserpine down. It will bear to be praised by poets. The blue flag, not-withstanding its rich furniture, its fringed recurved parasols over its anthers, and its variously streaked and colored petals, is loose and coarse in its habit. How completely all character is expressed by flowers! This is a little too showy and gaudy, like some women’s bonnets.

Yet it belongs to the meadow and ornaments it much.