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Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (10 of 10)

July 14, 2025, 2:47 pm July 14, 2025 2

From “Bearded Irises, Act I” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“The earliest varieties of irises grown and appreciated by gardeners in the 16th and 17th centuries were likely wild hybrids between Iris pallida, the source of lavender pigments, and I. variegata, the source of yellow pigments. Early collectors gave them various names, some pawned off onto botanists as species names like I. amoena, I. squalens, and I. neglecta. Each represented a relatively distinct color group, but the variation seen between clones was highly suggestive of their hybrid constitution. These seed-grown bearded irises were variously distributed across European gardens from the mid-17th century on. It wasn’t until the 1820s, when Parisian nurseryman Paul de Bure raised and named hundreds of seedlings, that the movement to popularize bearded irises gained a footing; ‘Buriensis’ (c. 1822) was his first introduction….

“By the 1870s the bearded iris fascination had crossed the English Channel, and early enthusiasts like Peter Barr were leading the production of new varieties in the British Isles. It was in the 1890s that many breeders, churning out dozens of new varieties each year, began to wonder if they’d reached the limit of the bearded iris’s potential. One of these was Sir Michael Foster, a professor of physiology at Cambridge and by all accounts among the most esteemed iris connoisseurs of his day. Foster grew and experimented with all irises, including oncocyclus irises from the Mideast and spurias….

“The American interest in bearded irises originated with diploids. Bertrand Farr, a music shop owner from Pennsylvania, imported Peter Barr’s entire collection (over 100 cultivars) and established a nursery near Wyomissing in the early 1900s….

“As America was catching the initial round of bearded iris fever, a schoolmaster from Godalming, U.K., was feverishly making crosses of his own. William Rickatson Dykes is the undisputed godfather of the genus, a position he earned partly through his association with Sir Michael Foster, a friendship begun at Cambridge while Dykes was a student there. Upon Foster’s death, Dykes inherited, by way of a mutual friend, copies of his predecessor’s notes and garden records, and like Foster, he bravely ventured into all sorts of deep and muddy waters with his experimental crosses between diploids and tetraploids and dwarf and tall species….

“Dykes traveled extensively to document species in the wild and collect them for horticultural evaluation; in his short breeding career, he introduced 34 cultivars, most in the early 1920s. Dykes died following a car accident in 1925. Two fitting tributes marked the next year: his wife, Katherine, introduced the yellow iris that bears his name, and in June 1926 the British Iris Society created the Dykes Medal honoring the most outstanding variety of the year — an award still coveted by breeders worldwide.”

From “Familiar Landscapes” by Lawrence Raab in The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Robert Pack, Sydney Lea, and Jay Parini:

Morning’s sudden and extravagant
green seems to suggest the higher
whiter waves of the air, what moves
through the flurry of these
first leaves, floating and falling
beyond everything I am able to see.

Against that brightness, a flock of blue,
a single yellow iris
creaks on its shaft….

How persistently
the eye resists the familiar,
so easily finding itself content
among its accustomed walls,
the expected trees and avenues,
that it fails to see them
and will acknowledge
only what has been changed or lost
or taken away.

Hello!

This is the tenth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

In the ninth post in this series, I introduced a “self iris” whose standards and falls all demonstrated an intense, highly-saturated yellow color. As I described in that post, the ability of that iris to produce colors with such intensity originated in its genetic heritage (enhanced carotenoid production) as well as its growing environment (full day sunlight), which worked together to encourage the iris to produce more and more yellow-colored cells. In this post, we’ll look at some other yellow variations, so I’ve placed two representative samples to the right of the previous yellow self iris below to show their visual differences.

The irises like those in the second and third image above are located in older sections of Oakland Cemetery, neither kind receiving the same level of full-day sunlight as the first one. The partial sunlight they receive varies because they’re all located at boundaries between sun and shade, where nearby shrubs or trees filter out some sunlight at different times during the day. Both kinds get most of their sun exposure during the morning hours — something that irises like these are usually very happy about — with those like the second image spending most of their afternoons in full shade.

At the time I took the photographs — around mid-day — those like the second one were already fully shaded. That actually puzzled me a little, as I didn’t realize there were any irises that could do well with so little light, until I came across this brief note in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“In very hot climates, bearded irises will flower in shade. In Britain, the only bearded iris that managed to bloom in my garden in semi-shade was Iris flavescens, an old soft lemon variety.”

Though I couldn’t confirm it, I’d already concluded from my research on yellow irises that there was a good chance the shaded varieties were genetically related to Iris flavescens or its ancestors — because of their visual similarity to the yellows produced by William Rickatson Dykes and subsequent breeders. That such cultivars have been adapted to partial shade adds a bit of confirmation to that conclusion, especially since these shade-tolerant irises demonstrate another feature that enables them to adapt to lower levels of sunlight. Their falls — as you can see in the second image — don’t droop downward like the falls in the first and third images. Instead, they open to a horizontal or slightly upturned position and stay there while the flowers are in bloom. This enables them to capture additional sunlight (compared to the droopy falls), take advantage of fewer hours of sun shining on their petals, and still keep their photosynthesis humming along. Their ability to do so well with limited sunlight makes them ideal for their placement among the old memorial structures and stonework in the historical sections of the cemetery — where their heirloom quality fits perfectly with the garden design.

The final thirteen images below show different views of the blooms on a single iris plant, a very stately one positioned at the intersection of two walking paths in front of terraced walls, where it beckoned me to photograph it as well as its white and purple relatives in the background. This iris captures light midway between the well-sunned yellow self irises and the mostly-shaded heirloom irises, something that can be seen in its color production. The yellow saturation falls about midway between the other two cultivars; and its position in partial sun means that it doesn’t have to flood its petals with protective yellow carotenoids. It can, instead, retain and display one of its most significant features: carefully placed swatches of yellow near the throat of the falls, and similarly colored yellow striping edging those petals around an oval-shaped white foreground.

My camera, as it turns out, was somewhat mystified by this iris, and produced a RAW image that was mostly yellow — or at least appeared that way because there was enough yellow to create a color cast over the entire image. We end up with this color cast because there’s enough light (despite a cloudy sky) to over-saturate yellow and the color yellow fills so much of the frame in this close-up view.

A simple white balance adjustment — which removes yellow tint — gets us part way there; or, at least, starts to hint at the contrasting color combinations that are present in the falls. Now we can see that there’s pure white that was hidden by the camera’s interpretation.

This improved view of the colors in this iris’s falls influenced the adjustments I made next: I changed the color relationships to create greater separation between the flower’s yellow tones and its whites, then added some texture. The texture addition finishes the job, sharpening the contrast between yellow and white, and enhancing the fine vertical lines that run down the falls. Here are the three step changes showing the transition from the camera’s original interpretation, to the white balance adjustment, to the final version of this image.

Making these adjustments produces a cleaner and brighter image, but it also does something more important than that. It shows a flower that reflects the intentions of its breeders, who altered its genetics to produce the yellow and white contrasts, and the yellow edging, in the falls. The placement of this yellow edging reveals those intentions, because — as you can see in the final photograph — it’s so precise that it looks like it was drawn there, and appears not only on the tops of individual petals but is reflected or mirrored in the colors underneath the petals. Coloration like this is not likely an accident of nature for irises with decades of breeding history, so their photos should acknowledge the technological and scientific efforts, and examine that in the context of their use in formal or memorial gardens like those of Oakland Cemetery.

With that, we’ve come to the end of this project. Through ten posts, about 300 photographs, and around 10,000 words, we’ve done much more than just looked at pretty pictures of fine irises. We’ve traversed topics like how irises are classified scientifically and into color or pattern categories; how their appearance reveals their genetic history and breeding; and how they adapt to their environment by producing different colors and forms. We’ve positioned them across multiple cultural dimensions and explored how they fit into memorial or botanical gardens; how their presence relates to garden design; how photography, art, and poetry can help us see them better and learn more about them; and how they’ve been observed throughout history as symbols of life’s bounty, beauty, and endless complexity.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10)

July 10, 2025, 9:48 pm July 10, 2025 2

From “Yellow” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“I think we take yellow for granted in the iris world, despite the fact that clarifying it from sodden and sullied to lustrous and sparkling was one of the greatest challenges of iris breeding in the 20th century. Many have credited the venerable ‘W. R. Dykes’ (Dykes-Orpington 1926), the iris named for the godfather of the genus, with starting it all — stirring frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic for sun-kissed tints on iris flowers.

“The range of yellow could cover continents in geographical terms. From the palest butter and white blend like that of ‘Melted Butter’ (Fan 1994) to the eye-searing, dark cadmium yellow blossoms of ‘Throb’ (Weiler 1991), yellow unspecifically describes many colors.

“But for much of the iris’s existence, yellow was a rare color, save the few golden or dirty yellow examples of Iris variegata or I. pumila. The earliest yellow, and at that a pale naphthalene yellow, was probably ‘Flavescens’ (De Candolle 1813), an old-fashioned diploid still found along highways and around old homesteads. It seems that generations of gardeners have passed this variety around, or it’s seeded with vengeance beyond the confines of its planting space. Either way, it’s still a simple charmer worth having in stock should an ugly fence or shed need some herbaceous company.

“But early diploids like ‘Flavescens’ were limited in their ability to transcend their own murkiness and fulfill a breeder’s quest for shiny, lustrous yellow. The conversion of diploids to tetraploids made this jump effortless. The originator of the most important yellow of the 20th century, W. R. Dykes, earned the honor of having a clear yellow tetraploid seedling of his named posthumously after him. Though the parentage remains unknown and subject to speculation, there’s no arguing that almost every yellow tall bearded iris and many median irises trace back definitively to ‘W. R. Dykes’.”

From “Irises” in Black Ash, Orange Fire: Collected Poems 1959-1985 by William Witherup:

Opened the kitchen curtain
for light
and was shaken awake
by your purple and yellow irises —
swollen and dripping color
on the morning canvas.

Iris, messenger from the gods
and goddess of the rainbow.
Beauty, dressed in her classic
and romantic robes,
or just pure flower, nameless….

This morning I pulled
the curtain on your garden
and a rainbow
arced into my coffee cup.

Hello!

This is the ninth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

It seems we took a little break after the eighth post in this series! It wasn’t really a planned break, but starting in the last week of June, we had the longest stretch of rain- and thunderstorm-free days that we’ve seen all spring. After April, May, and most of June made me feel like I’d put down roots in a rainforest, I finally got some consecutive dry days to work in my yard, clean up storm debris, discard plants that drowned in their pots, pull up weeds, and add a few plants for 2025 — including a couple of new daylilies (one called Cosmopolitan and one called Beyond Riches); two different kinds of canna lilies (one called Red Golden Flame and a pair called Bronze Scarlet); and some dark red Dipladenia, the shrubby cousin of the Mandevilla vine. Since my planting season got off to such a late start, I chose plants I know are good at handling the July through September Georgia heat. I’m sure I’ll photograph them all as they take root and start blooming, probably later this month or in early August. But for now, let’s get back to our Iridaceae….

The irises in this post and the next one will include several variations that show off many shades of yellow. As Kelly Norris suggests in the quotation at the top of this post, we may think of yellow irises as very common, perhaps ranking next to purple as one of the most common iris colors. Yet as we’ll explore in these last two posts: the yellow irises we see today have a complex natural and genetic history, where they’ve evolved from the pale yellows of their wild ancestors or early garden inhabitants to the richly colored and textured irises produced by modern breeders.

In one of my previous posts, I introduced a botanical drawing by 17th-century German artist Hans Simon Holtzbecker, who also created this drawing showing a purple and yellow pair side-by-side:

That Holtzbecker chose to pair these colors could be coincidental, or it could reflect his observation of purple and yellow irises found together in the European gardens he studied for his drawings. The right side of the drawing captures his interpretation of yellow shades that would have been prevalent among irises 400 years ago, showing the pale, dirty, or slightly golden tones Norris describes at the top of this post. Botanical drawings like this served a function that would later be provided by photography: documenting the forms and colors in the natural world, where artists like Holtzbecker produced accurate representations of the shapes and shades of specimens they studied.

When you look at Holtzbecker’s drawing, you’ll see where elements of the yellow iris that would receive less light — the throat of the flower, the bases of individual petals, or where the petals are curved — appear darker as the colors seem to shift from yellow toward orange. This is also true among my photographs, like this one…

… where Lightroom detects orange only in the flower’s beards, or in the most shaded sections behind each beard toward the center of the flower. The rest of the flower reads as yellow, whose tones we interpret differently based on the amount of light reflected by the petals. Had I photographed this flower in full sunlight, those subtle yellow tonal variations would not have been as evident. Light filtered through clouds not only reduces the amount of yellow coming from the sun itself, but also lets us see more of the color variations present in the flower. And yet: even filtered through the clouds, the saturated yellow in these irises was substantial enough to splash a yellow color cast across the entire image that was, thankfully, easy to correct by adjusting white balance.

I split my photographs of yellow irises between this post and the next one based on their location in the gardens. This post shows newer plantings that normally get full sun; the next one will include yellow irises from older sections where they receive partial sunlight at the edges of plantings like shrubs and trees, and are positioned among memorial structures placed in the cemetery decades ago. These location differences will help us see how environmental conditions affect an iris’s color, and connect us to the botanical history of and the chemistry behind an iris’s production of color.

The color consistency in these irises places them in the color category called “self irises” — where all the petals of both the standards and falls show one solid color. That consistency is evident even in the partially opened flowers (as shown in the first twelve gallery images below), and is different from the buds of irises like Iris pallida ‘variegata’ where — as I show in my fourth post in this series — the emerging flowers present the color variations they’ll contain at maturity. The intensity and saturation of yellow in these irises, however, tells us a lot about how they might have evolved from their paler ancestors.

The appearance of yellow in these irises is determined by their carotenoid production, the term “carotenoid” referring to the yellow, orange, and red pigments present in biological entities including flowers, fruits and vegetables, and happy creatures like canaries and flamingos. For our irises, though, carotenoids (think of the color of carrots as an easy memory trick) serve more than one purpose: they produce the yellow colors we find so appealing, they help the plant absorb sunlight for photosynthesis, and they protect the flower and the plant from getting sunburned by that same light.

Imagine, for a moment, that you spent your days standing in a rectangular garden at Oakland Cemetery, where you faced the sun all day long and had no access to any shade. You’d need epic amounts of sunscreen to keep from getting burnt to a crisp — something these yellow irises face during their entire blooming season. The irises, however, have their own coping mechanism: the intensity of the sunlight across their dense, compact cellular structure encourages them to produce more and more carotenoids in response, each increase in carotenoids providing an additional layer of protection while simultaneously ratcheting up the level of saturated yellow color we see in the blooming flowers.

The ability of our irises to do that is not accidental, and it’s unlikely that yellow irises like those Holtzbecker illustrated would have been able to survive or even tolerate intense, all-day sunlight. Irises of such saturated and protective yellow are distinctly modern: their development occurred in the twentieth century, enabled (as Norris states above) by “the conversion of diploids to tetraploids” — a chemically complex discovery through which geneticists doubled the amount of genetic material available in developing irises, enabling the creation of irises with greater color saturation and vigor. Newer cultivars like Throb from the early 1990s — an iris that’s very close in color saturation, appearance, and form to those I photographed — clearly demonstrate the results of these revolutionary efforts (originated by William Rickatson Dykes) to produce irises that were even more sun-tolerant than their predecessors.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (8 of 10)

June 29, 2025, 1:18 pm June 29, 2025 0

From “Germanicas” in The World of Irises, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“Modern science has shown that most forms of I. germanica (the nomenclatural type of the entire genus), formerly considered a species, are natural intermediate hybrids of unknown origin. The Germanicas are cold-hardy plants of supreme vigor and unequaled persistence. A quick drive through any European or Balkan village shows that ‘Grandma’s Flags’ are still alive and well….

“The Randolphs (1959) brought back a sampling of these plants from the Balkans, Turkey and India, and from several European countries, all much alike — coarse, robust, bitone blue purples. Nothing is known of their origin, or of that of other natural intermediate hybrids that flourish in warmer climates: the whites, Albicans, Kashmiriana and Florentina (which also has a blue form), and the bright red-purple Kochii. Albicans was spread from Yemen throughout the Mediterranean area and into Spain by the Mohammedans, who planted it at their grave sites. It has been found in the Sierra Madre region of Mexico, presumably introduced by the Spaniards.

“These irises left their mark in the art of early times, in the company of angels and Madonnas, where we can remember them with affection and wonder at the changes our modern efforts have wrought.”

From “Bicolors — Bitones — Amoenas” in The World of Irises, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“When an iris fancier hears the term bicolor, in his mind’s eye he sees Amigo’s Guitar, Barcelona, Gala Madrid, Lord Baltimore and other well known irises in this exciting color class. But these varieties are of comparatively recent vintage with pedigrees dating back to the famous [Paul] Cook progenitors of the late 1950s and the 1960s.

“Historically, bicolors, bitones and amoenas were among the first recorded irises….

“[Jean-Nicolas] Lemon, one of the first to grow irises from seeds, listed in his 1840 catalog diploid varieties such as National, light wisteria standards, maroon falls, and Victorine, white standards flecked purple, with falls of blackish purple. During the 1880s [Peter] Barr introduced Perfection, a bitone in light violet and prune purple; [George] Reuthe produced Maori King, an excellent variegata; and [James] Veitch raised Thorbecke, white standards overcast with pale violet, purple falls with reddish bronze reticulations on the hafts….”

Hello!

This is the eighth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10).

The irises in the galleries below would be classified as bitone irises, “bitone” referring to a color scheme where an iris’s standards are a lighter tint of the color hue of the falls. We would likely refer to this one, for convenience, as a purple bitone — which would reflect the fact that the falls (and the most dominant color visually) appear to be dark purple, while the standards are a lighter variation of purple, light enough in this case that we could consider the standards pink.

But of course our perception of single colors actually exists on a continuum, and any given color — especially in tonally complex renderings like photographs of irises — expresses itself as a shortcut for the colors that are actually there. When I pass a color picker over either the standards or the falls in this image, for example, Lightroom detects two colors in opposing amounts. The standards and the falls both contain combinations of magenta and purple, with the standards containing more purple than magenta, and the falls containing more magenta than purple. While this may seem like an examination of color suitable for pixel peepers or color nerds, it’s useful in this case to confirm the iris’s color classification. The same colors are present in both the standards and falls, but their relative concentrations result in a flower whose standards appear much lighter in color than the falls — the very definition of a bitone iris, and something that distinguishes irises like this from “bicolor irises” where the color pairs are in different tonal ranges entirely, such as red and yellow.

The texture of the flower also contributes to these color contrasts. Note the difference between the visual (and tactile, if you could touch it) appearance of the standards versus the falls. The standards contain thinner, more translucent petals, that translucence allowing light to pass through the petals, giving them a bit of glow while desaturating their colors. The falls, on the other hand, are much thicker in texture. That thickness reflects the different cellular structure of the falls, where cells are more densely packed than those of the standards, simultaneously creating a cottony appearance while reflecting more saturated colors into the camera’s sensor. The camera effectively “sees” these cells, capturing not only all the subtle color variations, but allowing us to interpret the image as containing the significant differences in texture that are present in the flower itself.

Some comparisons between irises I photographed can help us see how iris enthusiasts evaluate them for color classifications. I’ve previously posted examples of blends (irises with a combination of two or more colors blended together); amoenas (irises with white or near-white standards with colored falls); and plicatas (irises with stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings contrasting with a lighter ground color). Here I’ve placed those three sequentially and added one of the bicolor images to show the differences: a blend, amoena, and plicata from my previous posts followed by a bitone from this post.

Each of these irises represents distinct threads in the development of iris cultivars, much of which occurred in the twentieth century, with the plicata representing the most sophisticated (and most recent) technical accomplishment. They are all visually and genetically much different from irises where a single color dominates — often referred to as “self” irises — such as the predominately purple and blue irises I shared in my first and second posts.

Note, however, what their visual appearance also implies about their genetic similarities: among other things, the amoena and the plicata share similarly colored and textured standards; the amoena and the bitone show both soft and dark purple falls; and the pink and light purple bitone colors also appear in the blend. These isolated examples, of course, could be extended to other irises — some of which you can see by clicking on the links in the excerpts at the top of this post — all of which reveal that their underlying genetic heritage has enabled iris breeders to produce irises in a wide variety of shapes and colors that we still immediately recognize as members of the Iris genus.

This enormous variety also means that horticulturalists planning gardens or memorials like those at Oakland Cemetery can choose irises to match the symbolic representations they wish to create. The plicatas and amoenas, as previously described, were used to build and populate plots where their colors blended smoothly with the stone of surrounding memorial structures. These pink and purple bitones, on the other hand — with taller stems and more saturated colors — are planted to capture attention and direct your eyes or your travels to other sections of the property. Their appearance, color harmonies, contrasts with their surroundings, and even fragrance may halt you briefly, before leading you to follow sidewalks or mount steps to a nearby site of contemplation or memorialization.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10)

June 24, 2025, 4:52 pm June 24, 2025 2

From “History of Bearded Irises” in Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell:

“Tall bearded irises, from some species of which our modern garden hybrids have been derived, grow wild only in Europe and Asia, more specifically from Austria through the Balkans and Asia Minor to Arabia. However, as the rhizomes will survive even though dry for months, some of the species and hybrids have been found over a far more extensive area, apparently carried by travelers or settlers. From its home in Arabia Iris albicans was carried along the whole northern coast of Africa… and even into Spain when the Moors invaded that country. Centuries later it was brought over to Mexico and from there by the early settlers to California, where it is still the commonest iris. Often it is found apparently growing wild, but always near former habitations….

“It is now accepted that all the tall bearded hybrids introduced before 1900 were derived from two European species. One of these is Iris pallida, found in numerous forms from the south Tyrol down the Dalmatian coast. This iris is readily distinguished by its glaucous foliage, its short side branches, short perianth tube, and scarious or papery bud spathes; the flowers are of self colors in many shades of lavender and blue, even to purple. The form called plicata, with white ground and lavender or purple edging, has not been found wild but is botanically indistinguishable from Iris pallida and doubtless derives from it. The other parent of our older hybrids is Iris variegata, which extends south and east from Vienna through much of the Balkans. It has thinner, narrower, greener foliage and shorter stems, with two or three lateral heads of flowers; the yellow standards and yellow falls are so often variegated with chestnut or dark red that the general effect is of brown….

“When I. pallida and I. variegata were grown together in gardens and the seed collected from them sown, a wide variation in color and pattern was the result. Even by the end of the sixteenth century there were many distinct varieties….

“For the next couple of hundred years there was evidently no great change in the character of these earlier irises, but in the first half of the nineteenth century nurserymen began paying more attention to them, especially in France. In 1841 [Jean-Nicolas] Lemon issued a catalogue in which he listed a hundred varieties with descriptions. Many of these were still among the standard commercial varieties offered by English and American specialists in the first decade of the twentieth century….

“About 1873 [Peter] Barr issued a descriptive list of his extensive collection, arranging the varieties in groups: aphylla (including forms of germanica), amoena (white standards and purple falls), neglecta (lavender standards and dark falls), pallida (lavender, light and dark blue, and rosy-toned purplish selfs), squalens (forms with blended, often rather dull, combinations of smoky blue and gray or yellow and red), and variegata (clear yellow standards and falls either veined a dark red or of nearly solid ox-blood color)….

“Barr’s classification was adopted and continued in English and American lists into the nineteen-twenties. Even to this day such terms as ‘amoena’ and ‘variegata’ are applied to modern hybrids of these old color patterns.”

Hello!

This is the seventh of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10).

I included the long excerpt from Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell at the top of this post because it provides a concise yet sweeping history of developments in iris breeding and classification, leading directly to the irises I photographed for the galleries below. That quotation also connects this post to two of my previous posts: the one about white irises descended from Iris albicans, and the one describing the development of plicata color patterns in twentieth-century iris breeding.

The irises I photographed for this post feature the color pattern called “amoena” — a pattern classification Peter Barr used for iris flowers with white standards and purple falls. With twentieth-century improvements in botanical detective work after Barr built his original catalog, some of his terms — like amoena and neglecta — continue to be used as color or pattern descriptions for irises; whereas others like aphylla, pallida, and variegata have evolved into the names of individual iris species like Iris aphylla, Iris pallida, and Iris variegata. And the color pattern “amoena” has itself been adjusted during the same evolutionary period, where it’s now defined as “white or near-white standards, with colored falls.” This definitional change may seem slight at first, but it reflects both more precise observation of iris colors as well as incorporating genetic changes where the standards may vary slightly from pure white, and the falls may include colors other than purple, such as blue, orange, or brown.

Understanding iris color patterns seems to fall into this very philosophical (!!) visual framework: once you see them, you can’t unsee them, nor would you want to. To illustrate that, let’s compare a pair of irises, one from my previous post about the plicata color pattern, and one from this post, which we now know to identify as an amoena.

Since our eyes are quickly drawn to color contrasts, the near-white standards are likely to register for you first. That the plicata’s standards are a slightly creamy white, and the amoena’s standards have some very soft lavender or purple tones, doesn’t take away from considering them “white” — as we all recognize that the color white (whether in nature or not) may contain a range of other muted colors. How much color we detect along with white in photographs (or flowers) like these will vary depending on lighting conditions (especially sun or shade), the ability of our cameras to capture subtle color variations, and more simply, how closely we’re paying attention.

Iris experts would see these standards the same way, but they would then observe the falls, where the differences between the two determine their color pattern classification. The left iris — the plicata — shows a distribution of color in the falls that meets the classic definition of a plicata pattern — “stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings contrasting with a lighter ground color” — that gradually increase in color saturation (while retaining the overall pattern) from the throat of the iris to the edges of the petals. The lighter ground color — the whiter sections near the throat — are themselves not pure white or even just off-white: the camera (and Lightroom) reveal that those regions contain cells (or pixels) containing various shades of very light blue or very light purple.

The flower on the right shows a completely different arrangement of colors. Even though there are many shades of red, purple, and blue among the standards, there is no lighter ground color showing through to create the kind of pattern visible for a plicata. The falls’ colors, while varying tonally, are fully saturated with no breaks or strong contrasts — except the sharp contrast between the falls and the upright standards, that contrast itself being a defining characteristic of an iris classified as an amoena.

Barr didn’t differentiate between amoenas and plicatas in his iris classifications, in part because plicatas required a level of genetic engineering to redistribute selected colors to parts of the iris while suppressing others, that did not exist until well into the twentieth century. While amoenas did exist and were being genetically produced in his era, their shifting definition from “white standards with purple falls” to “white or near-white standards, with colored falls” reflects how iris genetics have changed: today’s amoenas can be engineered to contain a wider range of color variations in both the standards and the falls than Barr would have been able to observe. But we can observe them, and enjoy how these fascinating color variations make one type of iris so different from another. And this broader definition allows us to classify and appreciate a wide range of color varieties that have more recently been genetically engineered for our gardens, while maintaining the essential visual characteristics (and their definition) intact.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10)

June 22, 2025, 3:22 pm June 22, 2025 7

From “White Flags” in Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:

“The first perennial irises to bloom in spring are several antique bearded types of dwarfish stature. Because their height is modest, they are usually included in the median iris group… in modern classifications. The ‘beards’ of these species are formed by long rows of feathery stamens, which mark the centers of the three outer petals, or falls. The inner petals, or standards, curve upward and inward to create the familiar fleur-de-lis seen as a motif in historic art and architecture….

“The most familiar of the historic irises in the South is the old white flag, Iris albicans. The Latin epithet, which translates as ‘off-white,’ was given to plants found growing in Spain during the mid-1800s. Although these irises are now common waifs in many warm countries, their original homeland appears to be on the Arabian Peninsula. Tradition holds that the Moors carried this iris wherever they traveled in conquest, planting the flowers as memorials on the graves of fallen Muslim soldiers….

“When Spanish colonists came to Florida and Mexico, they brought this Mediterranean flower with them and continued the tradition of planting them in cemeteries. These are now the most common irises in the South. The leaden flowers and gray, sword-shaped leaves of Iris albicans line paths and fill graveyards and vacant fields in March….”

From “A White Iris” by Pauline B. Barrington in The Melody of Earth: An Anthology of Garden and Nature Poems, selected by Gertrude Moore Richards:

Tall and clothed in samite,
Chaste and pure,
In smooth armor, —
Your head held high
In its helmet
Of silver:
Jean D’Arc riding
Among the sword blades!

Has Spring for you
Wrought visions,
As it did for her
In a garden?

Hello!

This is the sixth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10).

As I explained in the last post, irises are often categorized across several dimensions, reflecting their botanical structures, shapes, or colors. The plants in this post would be considered white irises, with a finer distinction applied to the first six as “cream” because of the light orange tones distributed throughout their petals. They are all likely variants of Iris albicans — an iris commonly referred to as “white flag” (as in the quotation at the top of this post) or as the “cemetery iris.” As they’re often associated with both weddings and funerals or memorials, one would presumably refer to them as white flags for the former, but as cemetery irises for the latter. This is an example, of course, of how the common names of irises (and many other flowers and plants) are applied differently depending on context and their intended use.

We refer to them as “white irises” because that’s how we experience them visually — yet even these predominantly white flowers can reveal a lot more about irises and their genetic history. Note how those in the first six photos also demonstrate the presence of blue or blue-violet colors in some of the petals and, most obviously, in the unopened buds:

The presence of these blue-violet tones hints at the fact that these white irises have also been genetically engineered to produce light blue variants, something that’s possible because the blue tones are present at the cellular level in irises of this species. Even those that we classify as “pure white” like this one…

… show the potential to produce blue-violet colors: see how, at the throat of the flower just behind the beard, there is a rectangular swatch of the same blue tones that are present in the unopened buds I mentioned above. And further: when I work on these photos in Lightroom and pass Lightroom’s color picker over the standards or falls in photos like this one, Lightroom detects blue and purple throughout the flower petals.

The pixels the camera captures — which represent the accumulated color of thousands of the flower’s individual cells — include these blue-violet tones, almost as if there was a one-to-one relationship between the camera’s pixels and the flower’s cells. What our eyes visualize as white, in the case of these irises (and the color white in nature more generally), reflects how we see these colors and think of them based on color dominance. Yet closer inspection — especially when aided by a precision tool like a digital camera — reveals much more, and helps us see how it came about that the very name Iris was derived from the Greek word for “rainbow” with even white irises as repositories for all the colors in this rainbow. The camera has captured light reflected from many individual plant cells, and when it detects blue tones in apparently white areas, it’s recording the cumulative effect of pigments distributed across thousands of cellular structures.

As with other posts in this series, I photographed these irises in two locations at Oakland. The first six were from older or more historical sections of the property; the rest were among the newer plantings, arranged in clusters in an open acreage of irises. This location separation illustrates different ways in which irises have been used and developed over time, reflecting technological developments in the genetic and botanical history of these irises. The cream irises are directly connected to nearby memorials, whereas the pure white ones were planted to establish formal, contemplative displays. The white ones, by contrast, are a later genetic development, where most (but not all) of the color-producing pigments have been reduced significantly, so that the irises reflect their more pure white characteristics to our eyes, an effect that is emphasized by planting them in clusters producing multiple blooms instead of the more solitary plantings of the older irises.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

DaleDucatte.com

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (10 of 10)

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