A rose is a rose, but an iris is a rainbow.
Indeed, the Greek word for rainbow is iris. The old Greeks, known for many aspects of their culture, also apparently had a few keen eyes among them sharp enough to know a nice flower when they saw one. If not one of the ancient Greeks, then someone who knew and loved their language. And they didn’t see it in monochrome. It was a Technicolor, polychrome, many-splendored rainbow flower, so they called it iris.
When God made the first iris, he may have colored it blue. Whatever color that first iris was, God stored within its chromosomes the ability to produce more different colors than exist in any other species of flower. Nowadays they come in just about all colors except genuine fire engine red. Thus, the rainbow. Well named!
For years botanists have been studying plants. Mendel did his experiments to discover dominant and recessive genes. Scientists working with plants have improved the quality and quantity of food on our tables. The ornamental trees and flowers that bloom in our yards have been bred from simpler, plainer ones that grew in the past.
For the most part, irises arrived late on the hybridizing scene. But for decades now, folks have been daubing pollen back and forth between them, developing characteristics, the potential for which had always been hiding there, just waiting to be discovered. So now we have an amazing variety of size, color, form, and substance.
There are several flowers that vie for the honor of being the lilies of the field spoken of by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and the iris is one of them. One of the most exotic types of iris, the aril, is native to Bible lands and may well be the flower in question. This iris has been bred into “ordinary” irises, and is known as an aril bred. I have enjoyed growing them for years, wondering if Jesus might have seen one of their ancestors.
Back when God first caused vegetation to come forth on the earth, and “saw that it was good,” he knew all the potential stored within even the simplest blossom. He invented genes and chromosomes, so none of the marvels of modern botany come as a surprise to him. We’re still in the experimenting and discovering process ourselves. And we’re discovering he put a lot of good stuff in his irises. JC