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

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?

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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).

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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!

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