It appears there will be a variety of celebrations for Flag Day this year, but I plan to do what I always do on June 14.
I lead a nature hike called "In Search of Blue Flags," because these native wildflowers bloom faithfully right around Flag Day.
While people are waving flags in parades and at rallies, blue flags are quietly raising their own banners in wetlands throughout the region.
Blue flag is a lovely native species of iris. It isn't large and flamboyant like the garden irises favored by European painters.
Its beauty is quieter — more at home in a marsh than a palace garden.
American artist Mary Vaux Walcott, sometimes called the "Audubon of Botany," captured this delicate North American flower in her botanical paintings. Walcott was also an accomplished mountaineer who explored glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, proving that scientists and artists need not stay indoors.
The blossom features three large, downward-curving sepals called falls. Each is decorated with yellow and white veins that act as nectar guides — a visual runway showing pollinating insects exactly where to land.
But why are they called flags if they are irises?
No one seems entirely sure.
Some historians and botanists believe the French fleur-de-lis was actually a stylized iris. The emblem appeared on royal banners and military flags, and perhaps the name followed the flower.
Others point out that the Middle English word "flagge" referred to rushes and reeds growing in wetlands. Since blue flags often grow among such plants, the name may have originated there instead.
Whatever the origin of the name, the flower has a clever way of making sure pollinators do their job.
The falls serve as landing pads for bumblebees. Following the yellow nectar guides, a bee enters beneath a leaf-like structure called the style arm. To reach the nectar, it must squeeze past the stigma, the flower's female part, depositing pollen it may have carried from another iris. As the bee backs out, it brushes against the anther, which dusts the insect with fresh pollen to deliver to the next blossom.
It's an elegant system — one that has worked for thousands of years without a committee meeting, parade permit, or patriotic speech.
Lots will be happening on June 14, but I'll pass on the parades and rallies. I'll celebrate Flag Day the way Mary Vaux Walcott might have — if she wasn't off climbing mountains to study glaciers — by wandering a wetland in search of flags.
