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From “Variegated Iris” in Iris by Fritz Kohlein:

“Variegated shrubs and plants are not without controversy. There are a few specialists and gardeners, for instance, who reject them because they feel that the cause of this mottling is frequently a plant virus. But the majority of gardeners appreciate these natural deviations which enliven and break up the otherwise monotonous greenness that often prevails outside the blooming season.

“Within the genus Iris there are a whole series of variegated species. This means that the sword-shaped leaves are more or less striped with white or a pale yellow, wherever chlorophyll is lacking. It’s possible that such an iris will produce a completely pale fan of leaves….The skillful use of variegated iris can make a big addition to any planting.

“In Tall Bearded Iris plantings we are limited to Iris pallida ‘Variegata’. Its yellowish-white variegation contrasts nicely with the grey-green background of its wide leaves. This iris from the southern Alps and the Adriatic has beautifully formed, pale lavender-blue blossoms which hug the bloom-stalk. It is not free branching. In larger iris plantings or when using newer varieties, this iris should be planted sparingly in clusters…”

From “Bend the Rain” in The Spiritual Teachings of Nature: Volume 2 by Chris Moody-Schulz:

Blades of grass eagerly peck their way
through the outer shell of earth’s womb
to begin their seasonal life as stage hands,
they paint a back-drop of green….

The slashing rain scissors this way and that
tilling the vernal ground
and allow wild flowers to seed and settle in,
nudging elbows in the crowded bed.

Robin and her red breasted friends
tweeze a wiggly meal,
determined spring rains
bend on rainbow winds.

I bend to touch the inaugural iris,
rising from her rhizome bed;
Dutch Blue, Purple Passion, Blueflag,
buhled from the magician’s hand.
I recall a saying carved into a driftwood bench,

“I Shall Always Love a Purple Iris”

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Hello!

This is the fourth 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).

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The irises in the galleries below are Iris pallida ‘Variegata’ — “variegata” in this case referring to the striped or variegated leaves that give this plant its distinctive appearance. “Variegata” has more than one meaning in iris nomenclature — including its use in the separate species name Iris variegata — but in this case refers to the bicolor leaves, which are typically yellow and green but may be white and green in other variants.

These irises are closely related to those in my second post — Iris pallida — and the flowers of both plants show off colors in the blue, violet, and purple ranges quite effectively. Iris pallida’s flower structure is slightly more complex, individual flowers are sometimes a bit larger, and the beard coloration is a more saturated orange — but it’s easy to see how the two could be mistaken for each other, were it not for the smashing background of yellow and green stripes surrounding the Variegata cultivar. That striped background — genetically engineered over the centuries to become a permanent characteristic of this cultivar — will remain intact well into the summer, as later season flowers bloom around them, and photographers such as myself pose those newer arrivals with Variegata’s leaves behind them.

There’s only one planting of Iris pallida ‘Variegata’ at Oakland Cemetery, and these irises greet you from atop a wall at the intersection of two of Oakland’s main thoroughfares — one that bisects the property and one that leads around a curve and down a hill to a densely planted section embedded with memorial structures that I photographed previously (see Land of Azaleas and Roses).

Here’s that road, where, if you look closely, you can see Variegata’s leafy stripes near left-center, right where the road curves out of the scene.

And here’s the same photo cropped more closely so the irises are easier to see, and you might even recognize a couple of them in the following galleries.

Imagine yourself for a moment standing at the top of this hill, next to the irises, and observe how their presence at this intersection beckons you to head down the hill, while you take in the colorful plantings on one side and the memorial structures on both sides. This is actually one of my favorite parts of the garden, because of all the color and texture variations I can follow for a few hundred yards, and for how quiet it gets as you enter this section. And its plantings are so well organized that they vary from season to season, culminating in the appearance of early fall zinnias and mums, followed by the turn toward full autumn or early winter, where all the trees and shrubs in this section take on their fall color.

You might also see that there are only a few irises in bloom. Even though I photographed them on the same day as all the other irises in this series — most of which were about in the middle of their bloom cycle — the Variegata’s blooming cycle was almost complete, and the absence of even any desiccated blooms suggests (given our stormy April weather conditions) that its prime time had passed by a couple of weeks. So while I might have liked more photographs of this delightful variety, I instead took them from different angles and zoom levels, and also took advantage of varying lighting conditions by specifically shooting them in the shade, then returning to take a few more after the sun came out. Notice how the first seven photos — taken while the sun was absent — show the blue-violet colors more prominently than the rest of the photos — taken in full sun — where the sun’s yellow light emphasizes purple tones among flowers in the same planting.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “‘B. Y. Morrison’ and the World’s First Woman Plant Hybridizer” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:

“Grace Sturtevant, the world’s first woman plant hybridizer, was 52 years old when she issued her first iris catalogue in 1917. During the next 30 years she named and introduced more than 200 irises, some of which were among the most widely grown cultivars in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Many of her irises were used by other iris hybridizers in their breeding programs. Rare is the modern tall bearded, border bearded or intermediate bearded iris in our garden today that does not have a genetic heritage from cultivars bred by Grace Sturtevant….

“Grace Sturtevant was born in Boston in 1865…. Her earliest ancestor in America was Samuel Sturtevant who arrived in Plymouth Colony from Kent in 1642. She was the daughter of Dr. E. (Edward) Lewis Sturtevant and his first wife, Mary. Her father was an early advocate of scientific farming in the United States. His research and writings helped shape the course of American agriculture.

“E. Lewis Sturtevant introduced his eldest daughter to classical literature and he taught her botany and science…. It was his influence and instruction that led to her fascination with plant genetics and ultimately to her seminal achievements as a breeder of new garden irises….

“Her main interest in breeding irises was, in her own words, ‘as a study of genetics and of color.’ Grace Sturtevant was the first American iris hybridizer to establish goals, and she carefully chose which irises to use as parents to achieve her goals. She kept detailed and meticulous records of her crosses and her seedlings. She was one of the first to realize that the plicata pattern, which at that time consisted of blue or violet stitching, dotting or feather on a white ground, is a recessive trait….

“Each spring when garden irises burst into bloom in our gardens they are a living rainbow-colored commemorative to the Yankee lady from Wellesley Farms who loved irises.”

From “Invisible Colors” in Original Blend: New and Selected Poems by Richard Alan Bunch:

In the morning light,
the first thing that
comes into focus
is a vase of flowers
on our windowsill.

As you know,
night is a dream we have
and I vaguely remember
my dream of jitterbugging
in unparched fields
near water spills
on white formica
during the yellowing
gleam of lovely
summer days
away from the madness
of the big city
with its hubbub of media.

Those are classic moments
when the mother silence
of invisible colors
penetrates all the way
through unborn life
as nightingales
melodiously sing
on summer eves.

Meanwhile, blue plums
and gold iris
follow dreams of their own.

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Hello!

This is the third of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The first post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10); and the second post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10).

Of all the photos I took for this series, the irises I’ve included here display more complex color combinations than any of the others. Many irises contain dominant colors that we identify immediately when we see them — visible as either a single color, or, as often, a lighter shade of the same color in the standards that’s in the falls. We’ll often describe such irises by their single or duotone colors, calling them purple, or blue, or yellow — whichever primary or secondary color fits best. But the irises in this post want to be seen much differently.

Here I show the four color ranges represented in the following galleries. While there is overlap among the colors — especially those of the first three — there are distinctions that work reasonably well when describing them visually, at least to start. The first photo trends toward peach, the second toward pink, the third toward orange, and the final one toward purple, tones you probably now see more clearly since I attached these color names to the flowers.

These irises are most likely variants of Iris x germanica or Iris variegata — whose genetics have been modified to generate a larger number of color variations from their base forms, creating what iris breeders might refer to as either “broken color” or “multicolor” irises. While it’s not possible for me to trace that color generation back to its source, note that the beard colors in yellow/orange shades are typical of many (if not most) irises, and that the colors extending throughout the petals reflect (and elaborate on) those tones that are present in the central structures of the flowers behind and surrounding the beard. This kind of color development in irises was common to iris breeding efforts in the twentieth century, efforts to create visually impressive “show irises” designed to capture our attention by their combinations of flashy colors and their distinction from more commonly colored irises.

While conducting some research on Iris x germanica and Iris variegata, I came across this botanical drawing of an iris that, coincidentally, is identified ambiguously by both names.

The drawing was created by Hans Simon Holtzbecker, a 17th-century German artist known for his floral paintings and drawings. It most closely resembles my fourth sample image above, in part because of the tones Holtzbecker included in the standards — variations of the color brown — and the tones in the falls, variations of purple. As an accurate representation of the colors of this iris, though, Holtzbecker’s image couldn’t have included all the colors as those in my photograph, because irises containing these complex color combinations didn’t exist in the 17th century.

And yet: If I take Holtzbecker’s botanical image, import it into Lightroom, and adjust the saturation and luminance of its red, orange, yellow, and purple color channels, we can observe something about the drawing that isn’t evident in the original. The variations in the color tones become more apparent, and the drawing’s colors now more closely match those of my photograph taken about 400 years later.

Lightroom hasn’t created new colors through my adjustments; it’s just made them more apparent. This suggests that Holtzbecker was aware of the subtle tonal variations present in his subject’s petals and used layering techniques to gradually shift the underlying colors to their final versions. This kind of layering is not entirely unlike how a digital camera today “layers” primary colors to render tonal variations that aren’t necessarily apparent to our eyes, at least without zooming in and making a more detailed analysis.

That Holtzbecker’s drawing actually contains so many color variations that aren’t immediately visible tells us something about how important botanical drawings were for documenting color and form in the natural world. In eras preceding the use of cameras for nature documentation, botanical drawings served that purpose, giving naturalists a way to study plant characteristics of specimens they didn’t have direct access to. Such study accumulated over time into an awareness that flowers like irises contained a multitude of colors that might not reveal themselves during casual observation, but laid the foundation for an understanding of color variations used by twentieth-century botanists — like the pioneering horticulturist Grace Sturtevant, above — to tease out new combinations of colors, as they developed the skills and scientific techniques to do so.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Iris pallida” in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“Common in gardens throughout Western Europe, this perfect iris produces pale violet-blue flowers with white beards that are tipped yellow towards the back. The falls and standards, unlike those of many other bearded species, are very short and form a neatly shaped flower that is not damaged in poor weather conditions. In the wild the flower can vary from deep violet to almost pink. It is scented. The grey green foliage is resistant to disease. Early hybridizers used this species as a parent to create other bearded irises. It is sometimes known as Dalmatian iris.”

From “Blue” in Poems Purely for Pleasure by Raymond W. Groves:

Any color that is blue
Gives a thing the proper hue.
Be it raiment, sky, or water
Or the ink beside the blotter
Blankets for an unborn child
Or blue iris, growing wild
Music or the mood I’m in, or
The haze that’s mountain climbin’
Violets in a wooded nook
Bluebirds singing near the brook
Anything worthwhile, it’s true
Deserves to be a shade of blue.

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Hello!

This is the second of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The first post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10).

For this post, we’re going to explore some of the differences between the irises in my first post and those in this one, considering them visually while glancing at what those visual differences tell us about the iris’s botanical history. These blue-violet irises are likely Iris pallida, a close relative, or perhaps friends with benefits; and they look a lot like the I. pallida species as described in the quotation from Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia above.

Here I’ve placed a pair of images from the first post on top of two from this post, where it’s likely that you immediately recognize the color differences between the dark, saturated purple of the first two and the lighter blue-violet of the second two. This is more than just a color difference, however: the saturated purple occurs in conjunction with a petal structure that’s thicker than that of the blue-violet irises. Although this comparison isn’t precise, the purple irises would feel more like a piece of copy paper, and the blue-violet irises would feel more like tissue paper.

The structural differences also mean that the two kinds of irises react differently to the lighting conditions where they’re photographed. Hold a piece of tissue paper in front of a light bulb and you’ll see that much more light passes through it than copy paper held in the same position. This means that the purple irises will look nearly the same when the lighting is coming from the side or from the back, whereas the camera will pick up significant differences in the appearance of the blue-violet irises with side lighting or backlighting. As I mentioned previously, the lighting conditions did vary a lot during my photoshoot — from cloud-filtered to bright sunlight — even over the fifteen minutes that passed when I took these photos. So as you progress toward the bottom of these galleries, you can see how backlighting in particular affected the appearance of the flowers: parts of the flower that contrast with the blue-violet color of the petals (especially their orange beards and the internal parts of the flower behind the beards) exhibit a natural-looking glow.

How the two kinds of irises appear in photographs also gives us a chance to observe other characteristics. They’re both bearded irises (because they have beards!), with the purple ones — standing about three feet tall — classified as tall bearded irises and the blue-violet ones — standing about two feet tall — classified as intermediate or medium bearded irises. The height of the purple irises means that they have to produce very strong stems to support the weight of a large, complex flower blossom; and, from my observations, the tall irises were much less likely to show damage from recent thunderstorms or wind than the blue-violet ones, which had plenty of stems that ended up growing horizontally (like the example I showed in the first post).

The thicker flower petals on the purple irises also supported a genetic alteration: breeders selected irises that produced petals with ruffled edges that, over many generations, eventually developed the substantial amount of ruffling that you see in the two top photos above. The development of ruffled irises — taking place over a period of about five decades up to the 1980s — was both an aesthetic effort and a practical one aimed at strengthening the petals of larger iris flowers. (If you’d like to learn more about this part of iris history, search for variations of the word “ruffle” in the book I quoted up top, Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin, or in Austin’s companion book Iris: The Classic Bearded Varieties.)

With their thinner and more translucent petals, the blue-violet irises, on the other hand, often show only a slight curving at the petals’ edges (hinting at the possibility of ruffling) but would never have supported as much of a ruffle as the purple ones. And the edge curve often recedes and flattens on the blue-violet petals as the flower opens and ages; whereas it remains mostly intact on the purple ones throughout the blooms’ lifecycles.

Being able to photograph batches of similar irises like these (and those in future posts) from Oakland’s new plantings gave me a chance to research observations like this, following a kind of compare and contrast methodology where I would have plenty of recently opened flowers to compare with those that had been around for a few days. There are so many irises at so many different stages of development that I can use the plantings in a way that might be comparable to time-lapse photography of a single iris. We’ll explore these relationships in more detail in some upcoming posts, and engage in further examination of how the location and use of older iris plantings and newer ones reflect the cemetery’s history and its design as a memorial garden.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim:

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine…. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour….

“The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard…. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea….

“Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…. [Flowers] that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”

From “Flower-de-Luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers,
Or solitary mere,
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers
Its waters to the weir!

Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry
Of spindle and of loom,
And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry
And rushing of the flame.

Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance,
Thou dost not toil nor spin,
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence
The meadow and the lin.

The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner,
And round thee throng and run
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor,
The outlaws of the sun.

The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant,
And tilts against the field,
And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent
With steel-blue mail and shield.

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.

Thou art the Muse, who far from crowded cities
Hauntest the sylvan streams,
Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.

O flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river
Linger to kiss thy feet!
O flower of song, bloom on, and make forever
The world more fair and sweet.

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Hello!

This is the first of ten posts (yes, that’s right, ten!) featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery in one lengthy visit toward the end of April. As I mentioned in a previous post (see Studying Japanese Quince): we hope you like irises, because we’re going to spend the next five weeks looking at the photographs and exploring them in different contexts, like their colors, their culture and history, their botanical characteristics, and, sometimes, their appearance in literature (like the excerpt from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the top of this post).

There are 323 photos in the whole series, which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time not only post-processing each image, but organizing them in ways that might make sense for further exploration. As I often do, I’ve arranged the photos by their dominant colors, and ended up with these eight groupings to help me streamline processing in Lightroom and give me some anchors for further research. Here are the groupings in the order I’ll be presenting the photos:

• Purple and Blue: 50 photos
• Brown and Gold: 42 photos
• Purple with Variegated Leaves: 19 photos
• Purple Plicata: 36 photos
• White: 38 photos
• White Standards, Purple Falls: 50 photos
• Pink Standards, Purple Falls: 26 photos
• Yellow and Orange: 62 photos

How’s it possible to end up with a large collection like this — which you might describe as so many irises in so little time? I’m glad you asked! There have always been plenty of irises to photograph throughout the gardens, but a few years ago, the caretakers expanded their iris collections by several acres (near the Greenhouse Valley section toward the northeast corner of this map), where they constructed a number of new rectangular garden plots featuring just irises, segregated by color as I’ve done here. And that of course means that if you visit the cemetery during peak iris blooming time (late April or early May), you are pleasantly confronted with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual irises, fully flowering in open spaces, just waiting for you to take their pictures. It’s actually a fascinating addition to a Victorian garden cemetery like Oakland, where plantings are typically associated with various memorial structures and memorial plots, to have this separate set of gardens that have been designed as recently planted independent arrangements of flowers, unaffiliated with the garden’s overall historical design.

The day I took all these photographs started out overcast with some bright but filtered sunlight — my favorite conditions for photographing flowers — but as the morning progressed, the clouds came and went repeatedly so I got to experiment with a variety of lighting conditions including filtered sunlight, stark yellow/white light, and both backlighting and side-lighting. While I’ll sometimes abandon a photoshoot when the lighting conditions change like this, I decided to adapt to it and keep on shooting — in part because we had recurring severe thunderstorms of such frequency in April (continuing through almost all of May) that I thought I might not get another chance to photograph the irises without substantial storm damage. So as you progress through these photos, you’ll see some like this one…

… that adapted to getting storm-battered by adjusting the trajectory of the stem horizontally while still retaining enough upright support to top the stem with a nearly perfectly formed flower. Let’s keep that resilience and ability to adapt to the environment in mind as we move forward with explorations of the iris’s historical persistence, its botanical properties, and its cultural and memorial connections.

I chose Longfellow’s poem to accompany this first post because of the way it seamlessly blends these different connections. “Born in purple, born to joy and pleasance” — for example — doesn’t just describe the color of irises like those in my photographs, but also takes us back to the historical association of irises with royalty or aristocracy. Variations in purple or blue colors and the shape of an iris flower gradually emerged to symbolize royal courts or coats of arms through an association with heraldry, often described as fleur-de-lis (or in Longfellow’s rendering “flower-de-luce”). While there’s some overlap where fleur-de-lis may refer to the shapes of irises or to similarly shaped lilies (abstracting the shape of either flower to a drawing yields similar results), the two remain largely interchangeable in the cultural history of both plants (see Fleur-de-lis Origins for more on that) — and Longfellow clearly intended his poem to describe irises, as he did explicitly in the sixth stanza. That he started out by calling the plant a lily, then reverted to calling it an iris further on, reflects these historical connections.

While Longfellow used evocative colors to induce our understanding of iris history, he also used color to help us see irises in their natural environment, weaving his chosen palette throughout verses in the poem. He was sometimes explicit about that (like the “born in purple” phrase we just discussed), but more often he used an approach that we might call “reflective” by describing the iris’s surroundings. Words and phrases like flame, radiance, green yeomen, burnished, sunbeam, steel-blue, golden rod, celestial azure, and sylvan streams all imply colors that Longfellow found surrounding the irises — yet any of them could be equally attributed to the colors of an iris plant itself, especially when considering how many different colored irises there are, and the enormous variety of colors any individual iris can display. Pick any of my photographs below (or in the rest of this series) and you can find most of these colors; cruise the internet for photos of irises and their descriptions, and you’ll encounter similar phrases in those descriptions; wander for a while among iris gardens at a place like Oakland Cemetery — and whether you’re looking at newly planted acres, or older plantings associated with memorials, it will be quite obvious why the name of the iris itself was derived from the Greek word for rainbow.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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