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.
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!
I’ve also seen yellow and pink ones
Me too! There will be some seriously multi-colored ones in the next post, and I have some yellow and some pink ones for later on.
Wow!