Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10)

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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