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White Iris Mysteries (1 of 2)

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From “Iris florentina” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:

“One iris was an important economic commodity in centuries past: Iris florentina. The story of Iris florentina is fascinating and complex. The complexity of the history of Iris florentina stems both from the existence of a widely distributed imposter and from taxonomic reclassification.

“The authority of taxonomists is an awesome power for advancing our knowledge of the physical world. But taxonomists are not immune from errors of fact or judgment. This is exemplified by the history of Iris florentina. The history of Iris florentina is also evidence of the wisdom of the illustrious 15th-century Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti who observed that ‘nothing overshadows truth so much as authority’….

“During the Middle Ages the city of Florence became famous for three products: gold coins, fine silks, and orris root. The Florentines, who seldom missed an economic opportunity, were known to sell the finest quality orris root. It was made from white irises grown on the hillsides of Tuscany. These white irises owed their fame and their name to the city of Florence….

“Linnaeus described and named the white bearded iris in 1759. He gave it the name Iris florentina, which is what herbalists had been calling it for at least two-hundred years.

“Pierre Joseph Redoute painted the first detailed and botanically accurate picture of Iris florentina. Redoute’s painting was reproduced in Les Liliacees, often considered the finest set of botanical prints ever produced, in 1802….”

From “Iridaceae: Iris albicans Lange” in  P. J. Redoute Lilies and Related Flowers by Brian Mathew:

“It is unfortunate that the plant illustrated so beautifully by Redoute was not the same plant as the Florentine Iris, from the rhizome of which the perfume and medicinal agent known as orrisroot was obtained. The plate actually depicts an Arabian species, which was later described by J.M.C. Lange as Iris albicans. The true Florentine Iris is the more well known of the two and is also white-flowered, but is almost certainly nothing more than a colour form of the common Iris germanica and not a distinct species….”

From “White Pigeons” by Laura Maner Sams Sanders in The Yearbook of Contemporary Poetry 1936, edited by Margaret Nelson:

Today I saw white pigeons fly
O’er a snowy dogwood tree.
The background was a slaty sky,
With white clouds, foaming mistily.

White, densely foliaged Cherokees
Were blooming on a near-by fence.
Among them supped the honey bees,
Enjoying their fresh fragrance.

White irises on cool green stems
Were gleaming in the shady light.
Each flower held clear, dewy gems.
A symphony in green and white.

O’er this space of white and green
Six pigeons chose to wing their way.
As if to help complete the scene,
And add more beauty to the day.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of white irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. Oakland’s white irises are among the first irises to appear in March or as early as February, continuing to bloom for six to eight weeks, with a few exuberant ones making an appearance well into the summer if their growing conditions permit. The poem I included above describes one of their key visual characteristics — white gleaming even in shady light — and they tend to be visible from great distances because of that glow and their presence on a landscape not yet quite filled with spring color. The poem also highlights the color white’s appearance in other parts of the scene it describes, including the blooms of a Cherokee Rose — a plant I photographed at Oakland around the same time (see Rosa laevigata, the Cherokee Rose (1 of 2)).

I wrote about these white irises last year as part of a series of posts (see Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10)) and identified them there as Iris albicans. While that identification is still not inaccurate (!!), it doesn’t reflect the intricate history of this plant’s names, something that became apparent to me when I tried to follow a link I’d included to a Wikipedia page about Iris albicans. The linked page — originally “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_albicans” — no longer exists, and Wikipedia instead redirects automatically to its Iris florentina page instead.

Now, while it’s true that my approach to this blog has evolved into an informal “take pictures and teach yourself botany” methodology, it struck me as unlikely that I wouldn’t have noticed that an Iris albicans Wikipedia search took me to a plant with a different name entirely. By digging around in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I found a snapshot of the article I’d originally linked to dated October 2025, shown here…

… where you can see a note that says “It has been suggested that this article be merged into Iris florentina” near the top of the page. As good news to this amateur botanist, the snapshot of an October 2025 Iris albicans page meant that when I had previously linked to it — in June 2025 — it did indeed exist on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, this recent and very deliberate name change struck me as an emerging mystery that I needed to dig into.

As I’ve mentioned here many times, I use PlantNet to try to identify plants I photograph at Oakland, then use other resources to support PlantNet’s suggestions. PlantNet anchors its identification intelligence around various floras — roughly, geographic regions aligned with the body of native plants typically found there — so I uploaded four of these white iris photos to see what PlantNet had to say about them, using the Southeastern U.S. Flora (because that’s the region where I photographed the plants).

As you can see from this screenshot, PlantNet only identifies these white irises by their genus name Iris — something that happens mainly because they’re not native flora in my southeastern corner of the United States. This isn’t too unusual, and it’s often true for plants I find specifically at Oakland where — reflecting its Victorian history — the plant residents include a wide variety of non-native species whose ancestors would have been imported in the nineteenth century when gardens and garden cemeteries like this were being established. And in this case, PlantNet provides a useful message explaining that “A similar-looking species has been detected in another flora” with a handy button to click to identify the same images in World Flora encompassing the whole natural world.

Based on what I thought I knew about these irises, I would have expected PlantNet’s World Flora to tell me they were Iris albicans, as I identified them in 2025, but their identity comes up as Iris florentina instead:

So now I have two data points sending me away from Iris albicans toward Iris florentina; or, in the words of Rabbit from Pooh’s Heffalump Movie: “What we have here is a mystery of the most mysterious kind.”

Resolving (or merely understanding) the mystery took me back to the fifteenth century, where — as the first quote at the top of this post explains — the original plant name Iris florentina derives from the connections between the plant’s native presence around Florence and the commercial development of orris root for medicinal use in Italy. The blending of botanical and economic disciplines often lends weight to the cultural significance of plant families and species, and Iris florentina fits that model: the plant became widely studied and appeared in art and literature, such as in the Portinari Altarpiece painting from the 1470s where it carries significant religious symbolism. By the 1800s when botanical artist P. J. Redoute famously attributed a white iris drawing as Iris florentina in the first volume of his Les liliacees series (you can see the drawing here), the name was well entrenched for similar-looking white irises (in part from Redoute’s influence as an illustrator), even as botanists began to suggest other potential names and species differentiations for various observed white irises.

That helps explain why the definitive-sounding cliffhanger at the end of the Mahan excerpt above can be contradicted by the second excerpt from Brian Mathew’s book P. J. Redoute Lilies and Related Flowers, where Mathew stakes a different claim: that Redoute’s Iris florentina is actually a drawing of Iris albicans — Iris albicans being one of several names proposed for these white irises in the decades after Redoute published his Iris florentina drawing. But with discussion over whether these irises should be called Iris florentina, Iris albicans, or grouped with Iris germanica spanning both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mathew’s claim isn’t the last word either — a conclusion we can safely derive from my discovery of the recent Wikipedia article switch-up and unexpected PlantNet results.

Both the Wikipedia article and PlantNet’s floras use Kew’s Plants of the World Online for plant scientific names and plant family relationships (or taxonomies), and Kew now treats the name Iris albicans as a synonym for Iris florentina rather than as a separate species…

… supporting that conclusion with research produced as recently as 2024. So we have, in effect, returned irises of a particular species to their earlier European names and collapsed two species of irises into one — which means that the cultural, botanical, and historical threads of Iris florentina and Iris albicans are now intertwined, something we’ll explore in the next post in this series.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Daffodils: A Gathering (4 of 4)

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From “Scents and Sensibilities” in Daffodil: Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“Narcissus poeticus is an antique daffodil with an otherworldly beauty. It blooms late in spring, is believed by some to be the variety alluded to in ancient Greek legend, and displays a simple halo of pure white arching petals and a startlingly yellow scarlet-rimmed crown. My mother, like so many others, thinks of the Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus variety that grows in her garden as ‘Pheasant’s Eye’, and while poeticus may not be the daffodil that so inspired William Wordsworth it is imbued with a strange lyrical power.

“Sir Bernard Burke, the nineteenth-century genealogist who created Burke’s Peerage, realised this while investigating the enigma of the fallen house of Finderne for his 1860 book A Second Series of Vicissitudes of Families. Once a rich and powerful Derbyshire clan, the Findernes mysteriously vanished in the mists of the fifteenth century. The village, Finderne (now spelled ‘Findern’) still exists but when Burke explored it he could find no trace of the Finderne dynasty, so he accosted an elderly local for information.

“‘Findernes,’ repeated the old man, ‘We have no Findernes here but we have something that once belonged to them.’ He led Burke to a field containing traces of ancient ruins, and pointed to a bank of wild blooms. ‘They are the Findernes’ flowers, brought by Sir Geoffrey from the Holy Land,’ said the villager of the aristocrat’s campaign in the Crusades around eight centuries earlier, ‘and do what we will, they will never die.’

“These flowers are believed to have been Narcissus poeticus and their presence deeply affected the author. ‘For more than three hundred years the Findernes had been extinct, the mansion they dwelt in had crumbled into dust, the brass and marble intended to perpetuate the name had passed away,’ Burke wrote.

“‘A tiny flower had for ages preserved a name and a memory which the elaborate works of man’s hands had failed to rescue from oblivion. The moral of the incident is as beautiful as the poetry. We often talk of “the language of flowers” but of the eloquence of flowers [we] never had such a striking example.’”

From “Little Elegies: VI” by Rosemary Thomas in Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas by Twayne Publishers, Inc.:

These are the flowers that we picked
a year ago:
poeticus spread perfume out
to say to you,
“Come, I will go
back to your city-room, and wake the view
of orchard beyond walls —
take me with you.”

Now everywhere
narcissus wakes
beyond the view —
on walls without all reckoning
a silent thing —
petal-less, pitiless perfume now,
this March, this spring.

Hello!

This is the fourth of four posts exploring four daffodil varieties that I photographed at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. The first post about Narcissus pseudonarcissus is Daffodils: A Gathering (1 of 4); the second post about Narcissus × incomparabilis is Daffodils: A Gathering (2 of 4); and the third post about Narcissus tazetta is Daffodils: A Gathering (3 of 4).

In this post, I have photos of a small collection of Narcissus poeticus flowers featuring tiny white or light yellow cups or coronas, most etched with a reddish-orange edge color that — along with the shapes of their petals and the size and appearance of their leaves — helps confirm their identity. Like our previous daffodil friends, Narcissus poeticus is known by a long list of common names, including Findern Flower, Nargis, Pheasant’s Eye, Pheasant’s Eye Daffodil, Pheasant’s Eye Narcissus, Pinkster Lily, Poet’s Daffodil, and Poet’s Narcissus. Each of these has its own historical threads, but the one I found most interesting — in part because I hadn’t heard of it before — is Findern Flower. The village of Findern (originally Finderne or Fynderne) and the Findern Flower are partially described by Helen O’Neill in the excerpt at the top of the post, where O’Neill relies on genealogy research published by Sir Bernard Burke in A Second Series of Vicissitudes of Families in 1860 to recount the story or legend of the connections between a fifteenth-century family, their village, architecture and a landscape, and a flower.

Since a scanned version of that book was available on the Internet Archive, it was especially fun to confirm the details of O’Neill’s version of the story and read the original quotations contained in Burke’s description of his encounters at the village. While Burke doesn’t name or describe the flower, the connection to the mysteriously disappeared Finderne family and the town bearing their name appears to be intact: search the internet for Findern flower and you’ll find images clearly associating Narcissus poeticus with that name and history. And the Wikipedia article for the Findern village shows an image of the flower that certainly does appear to be N. poeticus, though a double form demonstrating the diminished corona and interleaved flower petals we discussed when I posted photos of white double Tazetta daffodils from Oakland.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Daffodils: A Gathering (3 of 4)

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From “Narcissi” in The Lore and Legends of Flowers by Robert L. Crowell, illustrated by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“There are many strains of native narcissus, and their hybrid descendants have greatly swelled the number. To add to the confusion, there is confusion in the terms! The daffodil, the jonquil, and the narcissus are all kinds of narcissus and are within the meaning of the Latin term narcissi, but not everyone knows where one leaves off and the others begin. To add to the confusion, narcissus is a common name for one of the kinds of narcissus! For the sake of convenience, here are three very broad categories:

“(1) The daffodil or trumpet type — this includes Narcissus pseudo-narcissus and is recognized by its big central trumpet, which is like the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned telephone. It is the parent of almost all of our big-trumpet daffodils.

“(2) The jonquil, which is yellow but sports different hues of yellow from those of the daffodil. The jonquil has rushlike leaves, and the flowers are clustered on each stem.

“(3) The narcissus, which has white petals and sepals and a cup often edged with orange or red.

“Within these large categories the species and varieties are legion. The ‘common’ daffodil (Narcissus pseudo-narcissus), which delighted Wordsworth and which enlivens the window boxes of London each April, is found among trees and in thickets in many parts of northern Europe. The ‘hoop petticoat’ narcissus, with its crown flared out like the skirt of a ballet dancer, makes its home in southern France and Morocco. Narcissus tazetta, the most widely distributed of all, is especially partial to Eurasia and the Canary Islands. Narcissus jonquilla is native to southern Europe and Algeria. Indeed, the Iberian peninsula is a stronghold of many species that survive in the wild.”

From “A Daffodil Code” in Daffodil: Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“To humans Narcissus tazetta has simply always been there. It has journeyed far from its original home in south-western Europe and gathered many names on the way, from Polyanthus Narcissus, Nosegay Daffodils, Paperwhites, Suisen (by the Japanese), Joss Flower to Chinese Sacred Lily in China, where it is considered auspicious.”

From “Early Spring (1860)” in Poems of John Clare’s Madness, edited by Geoffrey Grigson:

The spring is come, and spring flowers coming too,
The crocus, patty kay, the rich heartsease;
The polyanthus peeps with blebs of dew,
And daisy flowers; the buds swell on the trees;
While o’er the odd flowers swim grandfather bees.
In the old homestead rests the cottage cow;
The dogs sit on their haunches near the pale,
The least one to the stranger growls ‘bow-wow’,
Then hurries to the door and cocks his tail,
To gnaw the unfinished bone; the placid cow
Looks o’er the gate; the thresher’s lumping flail
Is all the noise the spring encounters now

Hello!

This is the third of four posts exploring four daffodil varieties that I photographed at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. The first post about Narcissus pseudonarcissus is Daffodils: A Gathering (1 of 4); and the second post about Narcissus × incomparabilis is Daffodils: A Gathering (2 of 4).

This post has photos of Narcissus tazetta, a daffodil species with a long history going back to antiquity whose descendants often appear in Victorian gardens like Oakland, with a naturalization history that extends throughout many of the southeastern states in the United States. And as we discussed in the previous post, wild or genetically engineered pairings of Narcissus tazetta with Narcissus pseudonarcissus produce the Incomparable Daffodil, Narcissus × incomparabilis.

Across the two excerpts and the poem at the top of this post, you’ll see quite a few of Narcissus tazetta’s common names. There are others as well, and here’s a list — which may or may not be exhaustive — of the common names (alphabetical of course) that I came across while learning more about the tazettas:

Bunch-flowered Daffodil
Bunch-flowered Narcissus
Chinese Sacred Lily
Cream Narcissus
French Daffodil
Joss Flower
Nosegay Daffodils
Paperwhite
Polyanthus Daffodil
Polyanthus Narcissus
Paperwhites
Suisen

Some of these names reflect regional naming conventions, adapted to English, like French Daffodil and Suisen — an anglicized Japanese term that, used in an internet search, will take you to images of and articles about Narcissus tazetta. Chinese Sacred Lily and Joss flower have similar regional meanings but with an additional ceremonial connotation, as “joss” refers to Chinese religious objects. Paperwhite crosses floral boundaries, since it’s also a descriptive name for Amaryllis — especially forced Amaryllis that often occupy western homes around the Christmas holiday — and the visual similarity between the two probably led to the name’s cross-pollination, as well as the fact that their plant family Amaryllidaceae includes both Narcissus and Amaryllis. The remaining terms refer more closely to the plants’ botanical characteristics, especially Bunch-flowered, Nosegay, and Polyanthus — all of which describe the way the tazetta flowers often split off from a single stem and cluster together as if in a bouquet.

So what’s in a name? Many, many things — apparently!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!