"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (2 of 3)

 , , , , , 0

From “Tall Bearded Irises” in The Magic of Irises by Barbara Perry Lawton:

“Over the years, iris breeders have added many colors and color patterns to tall bearded irises. They also have changed the forms of the flowers and their substance. Some experts have estimated that well over half of the iris varieties offered for sale by commercial growers have originated in the past ten years…

“Today’s irises remain in bloom for two weeks or more and many are both flared and ruffled. Some are what is called laced, with fringy edges to the standards and falls. The skimpy, droopy falls of earlier irises have become arched, more flared, well formed and broad in newer varieties, so broad that they almost overlap. The standards are of better substance in newer varieties, with sturdy midribs and full, rounded form. You can tell the substance of iris flowers by gently feeling the undersides of the falls. While some feel like tissue, others with good substance feel almost leathery.

“The terms for different color patterns are confusing for the new irisarian but worth learning since they describe so well the variety of combinations. ‘Selfs’ have flowers with standards and falls of the same color. ‘Amoenas’ are bicolored bearded irises with white standards and falls of a different color. ‘Bicolors’ have standards and falls of different colors. ‘Bitones’ are irises with standards and falls of different shades of the same color. ‘Neglectas’ have flowers that are blue or violet bitones. ‘Variegatas’ are bicolored irises with yellow standards and falls of a different color — red, brown or purple. ‘Plicatas’ have flowers with white, yellow, peach or pink ground color and a pattern of stitched or dotted edges in another color. ‘Blends’ have flowers with both blue or purple and yellow or pink pigments. ‘Halos’ have falls and sometimes standards outlined with a band of a lighter or different color.

“Finally, there are the luminatas, probably related genetically to the plicatas, which are known for the absence of anthocyanin coloring in the heart and halts of the iris flower. Anthocyanins are water-soluble pigments that impart to iris flowers colors of blue to purple….”

From “Child in June” by Julie-Ann Maude in National Poetry Anthology 2007, edited by Peter Quinn:

Carefully stepping over albino brittle weeds,
Sprayed last week as a reminder little feet
And little legs are here again: She skips to the lawn.

A sandpit sits untouched and the lid holds two
Bricks that tried to stop the rain intruding
And the snails from sneaking into a bucket or along
The handle of a spade.

Forget-me-nots have dried and withered but still,
Little hands want to pluck and display them.
Grass cuttings cling to flipflops; carried
Across a less than groomed, green carpet.

Past foxgloves whose lower bells beckon
And draw bees toward their speckled insides.
Purple and white iris petals unfold like
Fragments of torn skin….

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photos of irises with white standards and colored falls from Oakland Cemetery that I photographed earlier this year. The first post is Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (1 of 3).

Since I’ve accumulated a fairly large body of images and research on the plants I photograph on this blog, I’ll often take a look at earlier posts about the same subjects to see what I wrote about them — in part to avoid repeating myself too much in my writing — and how I photographed them. The top two images below show these same irises as I photographed and edited them in 2025 (from Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10)), and the bottom two show how I edited them for the posts in this year’s series.

Imagine my surprise! — to discover that I’d emphasized the purple tones last year but emphasized the blue tones this year. Both seemed accurate at the time I took and edited the photos, and the key difference is that, in 2025, I took all the photos in bright sun; but in 2026, it was cloudy during the entire day of my photoshoot. So in 2025, the colors of the scenes I photographed were seen by the camera and remembered by me as warmer (an effect of being brightly lit by the sun) than in 2026 when I photographed them in the shading provided by clouds.

While it’s probably true that most photographers aren’t going to remember hours or days after photographing something exactly what its colors looked like, it’s also true that the composition itself provides visual cues. For the 2025 photos, the presence of sunlight is readily apparent — especially in the flower stems and leaves, as well as in the background — and that reinforces the memory that the scene’s contemporaneous colors contained warmer (more yellow than green and more purple than blue) tones; with the 2026 photos shifting the colors toward cooler (more green and more blue) tones. As I’ve developed more experience with color grading and color correction in Lightroom, I’ve learned to rely in part on my memory but in larger part on examining the relationships among all the colors in an image, adjusting white balance so that the visually stable and relatively uncontroversial greens are rendered accurately. This approach shifts the entire image to warmer or cooler colors, and helps ensure that the whole image and its colors reflect the lighting conditions present when I took the photos.

But this, too, is true: blue and purple flowers have a particularly wide range of individual colors between “pure” purple and “pure” blue that make it possible to adjust their colors in editing programs like Lightroom in either the warm or cool direction without creating unnatural-looking results. Because each flower cell contains its own color signature, the accumulated effect — and the camera’s ability to capture that effect at nearly a one-to-one relationship between cells and pixels — is that a single flower petal may contain hundreds or even thousands of slightly different colors that both capture and reflect light differently. This, of course, demonstrates the complex relationship between botanically produced colors and how we represent them digitally, so I decided to ask my co-conspirator Claude.AI to help me explain how it works. To my question about why flowers like this tolerate such a wide range of color adjustments yet retain a natural-looking appearance, I was told:

There’s a genuine botanical reason both renderings look “right” rather than one looking like a mistake. Iris purples in this hue range are typically delphinidin-based anthocyanins — the same pigment class responsible for blue-to-purple color across a huge range of flowers — and that pigment’s expressed hue is famously sensitive to vacuolar pH, co-pigmentation, and metal-ion complexation, sliding along a continuum from reddish-purple to true blue depending on those factors. This doesn’t mean your specific flower’s pigment chemistry changed between years — it didn’t. But it does mean the hue space your warm and cool grades occupy is one that this pigment class legitimately spans across iris varieties in nature. You’re not distorting the flower into an alien color; you’re landing at two different, both plausible points on an axis that the pigment itself is known to travel. That’s part of why neither version reads as “wrong” to a viewer — you’re choosing between two positions the flower’s own chemistry validates as natural….

The key to understanding this passage is the segment about the flower pigment sensitivity, and it includes the well-known phenomenon often illustrated by how hydrangea blossoms can be induced to change color by modifying their soil pH. While our iris blooms don’t actually change color, each of their densely packed cells — especially because they have thick and opaque (rather than thin and translucent) petals — produces color and responds to light in its own way, and may even show different colors depending on the angle from which they’re photographed or viewed. These many color variations, then, are captured by a camera’s sensor, so we have much more to work with than just a few simple purples or blues. By comparison, the plicata irises I’ll feature in the third post in this series (which you can also see here from last year) have thinner and more translucent petals through which more light passes than is reflected, and can be accurately edited only within a fairly narrow color range.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (1 of 3)

 , , , , , 2

From “Patterns and Colors of Tall Bearded Irises” in The Iris Book by Molly Price:

“The plicata pattern is said to have originated as a mutation, probably from Iris pallida. These are the ‘freckled’ irises. Plicatas are white or yellow, dotted, feathered, flaked, mottled, or stippled with a second color.

“Fancies are plicata patterns gone wild. ‘Gene Wild‘, intricately netted in rose-red on cream, and its even more richly hued child, “Ankara‘, are typical of the fancy plicata pattern.

“The most unusual examples of a new trend in the plicata pattern are the sparingly stippled white-and-medium-blue plicatas, ‘Moongate‘ and ‘Tea Apron‘. In both, the color is concentrated in the style arms and crests….

“The bicolor iris pattern, with standards of one color and falls of another, usually darker, color, varies from the subtle to the sensational: It includes the amoena and variegata patterns, and a scattering of varieties in other color combinations. The American Iris Society Color Classification makes a nice distinction in its definition of the term bicolor — those varieties in which the second color extends over more than one-half the area of the fall. (If the second color covers less than half the fall area, the variety is classed as a self.)

“The amoena pattern… always meant white standards and purple falls….

“This pattern now includes… strong medium blues as ‘Miss Indiana‘, with beginnings in pink and greenish-brown amoenas, and reverse amoenas with colored standards and white falls. Purple amoenas are effective in gardens. Desirable varieties are ‘Bright Hour‘ and ‘Elizabeth Noble‘.

“Because of unusual problems in amoena breeding very few varieties were produced until Paul Cook began to work on the problem. Mr. Cook tried an entirely different approach involving the use of a dwarf species. His methods were so successful that in 1962 his medium-blue amoena ‘Whole Cloth‘ won the Dykes Medal. It has already been superseded by his ‘Miss Indiana‘.”

From “Fragment 113” in Selected Poems by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle):

… ah, flower of purple iris,
flower of white,
or of the iris, withering the grass —
for fleck of the sun’s fire,
gathers such heat and power,
that shadow-print is light,
cast through the petals
of the yellow iris-flower….

Hello!

This is the first of three posts with images of irises with white standards and colored falls from Oakland Cemetery that I photographed this year.

This new series includes two posts with irises like the top two below, and one post with irises like the bottom two. The color patterns may look similar at first glance, but the top pair shows the amoena classification — where the standards are white and the falls, specifically, have purple tones. The bottom pair shows the plicata pattern where the standards are white and the falls show “stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings against a lighter color.” Select the first image and page through all four to get a closer look at the pattern differences.

Of plicata and amoena, plicata may be the more familiar term, as it’s derived from “plicate” — a word used in describing textiles, fabrics, or clothing whose designs include folds or pleats. Amoena, on the other hand, is excluded from many general dictionaries and its use is primarily botanical. It was once assigned to what was believed to be a specific iris species — Iris amoena — and documented as such in volume 6 of Pierre-Joseph Redoute’s Les Liliacees in the early 1800s. You can see Redoute’s drawing of this iris here. After Iris amoena was determined to be an Iris x germanica hybrid rather than a distinct species, amoena was repurposed for the color combination of irises where — as Redoute’s drawing and my photographs show — the standards were white and the falls were shades of deep purple (and, as a result of later breeding efforts, shades of blue).

I’ve always found the combination of white and purple blossoms soothing in some way, even more so against the rich green of their stems and leaves. The amoena designation fits these irises well for another reason: the term Locus amoenus (where “amoenus” is a Latin word from which “amoena” is derived) refers to an especially pleasant place, scene, or landscape. So in the case of these white and purple irises, we have the amoena color classification for a group of irises located in what could be called a Locus amoenus — as shown in the first three images in my galleries below — where a particularly well-manicured, carefully designed landscape serves the purpose of peaceful observation and quiet contemplation, and also serves as a home for the amoena irises.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Purpleness (3 of 3)

 , , , , , 2

From “Tall Bearded Color Groupings” in The World of Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“The Sass brothers saved dark segregates from their blue and violet lines and began intercrossing them, introducing The Black Douglas in 1934. Meanwhile, Nicholls (1933) was working a line of darks. He used Valor, of his own raising, withThe Black Douglas to produce Black Valor. Valor, combined with a seedling involving Morning Splendor, Souv. de Madame Gaudichau, and Alcazar gave Mata Hari and Smolder, both dark purples, the latter with a reddish underglow. The cross of these two sibs gave Storm King, introduced in 1940.

“Paul Cook crossed Blue Boy, an I. aphylla derivative, with a white diploid. Crossing the resultant seedling into a line of purplish reds from the dark Cinnabar and bitoned Seminole, he continued to linebreed and was rewarded with Sable several generations later. Often referred to simply as ‘the black iris,’ this famous variety astounded the iris world when it was first marketed in 1938….

“The concentration (or dilution) of anthocyanin in flower parts has profound effects on color. Petal extracts from dark purple or black irises have far more pigment in them than do the paler blues. If the delphinidin in the tetraploid tall bearded irises is under monogenic control, and there is a dosage effect, we could expect four different concentrations and therefore four different hues of blue violet, but this is hard to prove because other pigments are usually present in varying amounts.

“The background effect is probably responsible for the so-called reds and browns in the tall bearded irises. In varieties showing this effect, the anthocyanin in the cell sap appears red or brown due to the presence of carotenoid yellows in the plastids.”

From “These Things I Like” by John C. Slemp in Sunshine and Shadows: An Anthology of Life in Prose and Poetry, compiled by Monta H. Crane and Selma Shepherd Downey:

I like the simple things of earth:
A daisy on the lawn,
A violet by the garden gate,
A breath of air at dawn.

I like the lovely things of earth:
A rainbow in the skies,
A row of purple irises,
A pair of shining eyes.

I like the solid things of earth:
A firm and rugged tree,
A mammoth boulder on the hill,
A mighty ship at sea.

I like the lasting things of earth:
A faith that conquers strife,
A love that brothers humankind,
A strong and worthy life.

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with images of purple-toned irises from Oakland Cemetery that I photographed this year. The first post is Iris Purpleness (1 of 3) and the second post is Iris Purpleness (2 of 3).

Returning to the four-part comparison I shared in the first post, the galleries in this post include the tall bearded iris shown at the bottom right…

… whose heavily saturated purple and blue tones often approach black, especially in barely opened and newly opened buds where you are seeing what will become the bottom of a flower petal. If we zoom into a section of that iris’s standards just above the beard, we can get a better sense of how dark the colors really are, and how even the more shadowed regions still reveal the presence of blue and purple tones at levels close to — but not quite at — pure black.

The excerpt from The World of Irises at the top of this post — while a bit technical — is from a section of that book that goes into great detail about color development in irises, from around 1910 through the middle of the twentieth century. The authors spend a lot of time on the development of darker iris colors — differentiating them from the more commonly observed yellows and lighter purples — where breeding efforts produced more and more saturated colors approaching, and sometimes achieving, what we would characterize as solid black. In the excerpt, I linked to pages at The Historic Iris Preservation Society about individual irises that contributed dark color patterns, and you can see many other historically significant variants in the article The Development of Black Tall-Bearded Irises from The American Iris Society

The intensity of the pigmentation these developments produced is very evident in irises like the ones I photographed for this post; but plants with living, color-producing cells seldom produce single, unblended colors. The “background effect” mentioned in The World of Irises refers to the subtle variations of red and other colors that our eyes often miss when viewing these irises from a distance, yet the camera captures them quite effectively. Red, reddish-brown, or colors close to yellow and orange get threaded through some of the iris cells by the presence of carotenoids among the purple-producing anthocyanin. The influence of these carotenoid-based colors among a field of dark blues, dark purples, and blacks connects these newer irises to their ancestors, where the more common yellow and blue or purple colors were enhanced to produce intensely saturated colors and striking new color combinations.

Thanks for taking a look!