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

Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (2 of 2)

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From “Genetic Domains in Tall Bearded Iris Flowers” in Irises: The Bulletin of the American Iris Society, Volume 93 No. 2 (April 2012), edited by Kelly D. Norris:

“Rhizomes, leaves, stems, standards, falls, hafts, beards, styles, even veins in the iris flower have different functions — hence the term functional domains. These domains have their own regulatory genes that form their respective organs during development. Some of these regulatory genes turn on or off the carotenoid and anthocyanin color pathways — the sequence of biochemical reactions necessary to produce a colored pigment….

“There are at least six genetic domains in tall bearded iris flowers. These are the standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles. Remember, the falls, standards, and styles differentiate from different whorls of developing plant cells and take their own color pathways with them. Therefore, these floral parts should not be considered as one unit. Each of these domains has a duplicate gene that regulates its color pathway. We know these genetic domains exist because of the different colors expressed….

“A solid colored flower, or self, has its color genes in sync — the standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles all express the same alleles for color. Thus the duplicate regulatory genes in a self have similar alleles, but once the synchrony between alleles is changed a wonderful world of color combinations opens up….

“Iris breeding for the past 100 years has focused on changing the synchrony between floral genetic domains to develop new color combinations (not new pigments). For example, first there was the amoena and then came the reverse amoena. The development of amoena, bitone, and luminata flowers has been a progression of changing the synchrony between duplicate genes in different domains.”

From “In Zurich” in So That It Flower: A Gathering of Poems by Melville Cane:

In Zurich,
Au lac,
As soon as it is June,
They deck the tables on the terraces
With yellow irises,
And serve a brand of scrupulously fine
Gay sunshine,
To mix with equally clear and sunny
Amber honey
And butter-balls, like curled tea-roses.

Then, if you so incline,
A draught, or two, or three, of wine;
And, as the blood begins
To sing with the violins,
One muses
And drowses.

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of irises with yellow standards and white falls that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. In the first post — Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (1 of 2) — I included irises planted in some of Oakland’s oldest landscapes where the irises hung out in solitary groups. In this post, we see some rejuvenated landscapes (like the first gallery image below) where the irises have complementary neighbors: the tall white-flowered Veronica spicata (also known as Spike Speedwell); and purple-flowered Verbena bonariensis (also known as Tall Verbena, Brazilian Verbena, or Purpletop Vervain), which I’ve positioned as the subject of a few of the photos with the irises in a supporting role. Is it just me, or do “Spike Speedwell” and “Purpletop Vervain” sound like they could be the names of cartoon characters?

With this post, I’ve reached the end of spring and summer 2026 photographs from Oakland. In past years, I’ve photographed lots of lilies in July and August, but doing so has meant that I’m still working on lily photos into fall and early winter, leading me to skip or miss out on photographing autumn color with the attention it deserves. Given how many asters and mums Oakland produces after summer subsides — and the variety of colors that its trees and shrubs produce — I hope to spend more time in an autumn frame of mind before the holidays roll around, without the lily photos pressuring me (!!) to edit, post, and write about them.

This, of course, assumes the temperatures start to turn cool here soon — we’ve been in the mid-to high-nineties every day throughout August and September so far — as asters, mums, and all the shrubs and trees really do use the cooling temperatures to tell them how to proceed toward fall. There’s no evidence of that cooling yet…

… but if we start dropping into the 50s at night this weekend and next week…

… the plants will likely take notice. And I will too.

Having lived half my life in northern New York, I have lingering nostalgia for the temperature changes that occur there between August and September, right when summer’s humid heat has worn out its welcome. Memories of my earliest visits to Oakland add to that nostalgia: I first explored its history and architecture extensively in October and November of 2007 for a series of research papers. So I’m planning regular stomps through the grounds of Oakland (as well as nearby Grant Park) in jeans, sneaks, and a nice fluffy jacket this fall — and recently bought a more landscape-appropriate new (used) camera lens just for that purpose.

The excerpt at the top of this post describes six “genetic domains” for tall bearded irises like these reverse amoenas, explaining how the flower’s standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles are all considered distinct (and open to manipulation) by geneticists producing iris variants. While I don’t claim to understand that part of the science well enough to explain it (yet), I still thought it was interesting that these genetic domains can be useful to a photographer (or any observer) as a way of isolating and focusing on various color regions our cameras capture. To help me visualize that better, I asked Claude.AI to produce a drawing mapping the genetic domains to their locations on the flower.

Using photos like this as guidance…

… Claude came up with this, a skeleton version of the reverse amoena irises that includes the domains mentioned in the excerpt (except veins, which could appear anywhere among the other sections).

If we put them side-by-side, it’s easy to see how the drawing is an abstract map to the living color regions of the flower I photographed….

… and it’s these regions, along with the color and texture transitions between them, that can be the most compelling ones to zoom in on. Close-up and macro photos of irises, in particular, are often composed to fill the frame with the regional transitions — not necessarily because the photographer knew about genetic domains and their color influences, but because these flower parts so deftly illustrate the ability of an iris (through genetic manipulation or natural mutations) to produce distinct arrangements of color, form, and texture within and at the boundaries of these regions — and color, form, and texture are so consequential to photography, photographic theory, and other kinds of image production.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (1 of 2)

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From “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in The World of Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“During the 1930s hybridizers, concentrating on eliminating lavender from the so-called pinks of that era, created pastel beauty in tones of orchid, amethyst and lilac; but true pink was tantalizingly elusive. When it appeared through the tangerine pinks, another mystery was added to irisology, for no one has established beyond doubt when or how the tangerine character evolved. The mystery is further compounded by its almost simultaneous appearance in widely separated areas of this country with one report of its appearance in England. But this is a problem for geneticists and cytologists; we can only trace its development from the first recorded variety to the present-day wonders, which eclipse the most extravagant dreams of the pioneer pink breeders….

“By-products were an unexpected bonus from tangerine bearded breeding. Yellows appeared among the progeny of initial crosses for pinks, and hybridizers were amazed and pleased with their quality. These yellows had a sheen and brilliance and a degree of laciness rarely found in conventional yellows.

“[Tell] Muhlestein’s Queen’s Lace, a creamy white deepening to yellow in the center and at the petal edges, is the most lavishly laced iris of 1950 vintage. Its pedigree includes Chantilly twice, Hall’s 42-10 and Gold Ruffles.

“In 1952 [David F.] Hall introduced the first Award of Merit yellows from pink lines: Limelight, a self in canary to greenish yellow with yellow beards; and Temple Bells (from seedlings), a sensation in deep yellow flushed apricot, flaunting bushy, tangerine-red beards. Temple Bells was followed by a sister seedling, Top Flight, with a richer infusion of apricot and brighter beards. Techny Chimes from Bro. Charles Reckamp was the first clear yellow self with tangerine-orange beards.

“Hall’s Golden Garland, from a seedling crossed with Palomino pollen, was the first introduction from tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow, a color pattern that has always been popular….”

From “The Moment” in The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine by Kathleen Raine:

…The sun that rises
Upon one earth
Sets on another.
Swiftly the flowers
Are waxing and waning,
The tall yellow iris
Unfolds its corolla
As primroses wither,
Scrolls of fern
Unroll and midges
Dance for an hour
In the evening air,
The brown moth
From its pupa emerges
And the lark’s bones
Fall apart in the grass.

The sun that rose
From the sea this morning
Will never return,
For the broadcast light
That brightens the leaves
And glances on water
Will travel tonight
On its long journey
Out of the universe,
Never this sun,
This world, and never
Again this watcher.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of irises with yellow standards and white falls that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. They’re among the tallest of the tall bearded irises I find at Oakland; yet even at their impressive three- to four-foot height, they still manage to produce multiple large flowers layered near the tops of very thick stems that never seem to bend even after days of windy spring and summer thunderstorms.

About half of the irises below appear in one of the older sections of Oakland, where the original Victorian garden design philosophy is evident in the blending of sloping landscapes, structures of mixed sizes and shapes dating back to the late nineteenth century, and plantings within memorial structures called grave curbs that echo contained raised gardens built outside of a memorial context. These tall bearded irises are especially suitable for this purpose, as they’ll expand to fill concrete-bordered spaces and tower over them to draw the observer’s attention to the memorial structures. There’s a visual randomness to a scene like this that’s quite different from the more precisely orchestrated landscape design I wrote about in two previous posts, shown in the second and third images below (from Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (3 of 3) and Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (1 of 3)). The three images together illustrate the historical evolution in memorial garden design through the twentieth century that emphasized symmetry while still retaining the same intermixing of natural and constructed elements.

When we zoom in on the flowers produced by these irises, we get to see and introduce a specific color pattern — a variation on the term “amoena.” Recall that the amoena classification describes an iris with white standards and purple or other single-colored falls. These irises reveal the opposite color arrangement with colorful standards and white falls, for which Clarence Mahan’s book Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them gives us a precise definition: “A name applied originally to a natural hybrid or variant of Iris variegata. Now a flower color pattern in which the standards are white and the falls are violet, yellow, pink or some other color. When the standards are colored and falls white, the pattern is called “‘reverse amoena.'”

The condensed excerpt up-top from “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in the book The World of Irises races through the decades between the 1930s and the 1950s to explain how the development of yellow irises with colors like these stemmed from efforts to improve tangerine-colored irises specifically, “tangerine” having been used to describe various orange tones present in many irises used for breeding.

These efforts have their own distinctive thread in the history of iris genetics, detailed in a reproduction (supplemented with images) of the entire chapter I excerpted in the American Iris Society’s article Development of Tangerine Bearded Tall-Bearded Irises. Scroll down on that page to the section “Tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow,” where you’ll encounter photos of three irises next to each other that closely match Oakland’s yellow and white reverse amoenas: Golden Garland (produced in 1957), and Debby Rairdon and May Melody (both produced in 1965). Debby Rairdon, in particular, is a nearly identical visual match to the irises I photographed. That (and my photographs) illustrates how these variants can produce pronounced waves or ruffling in the standards; richly saturated orange beards; distinctive and precise raised-texture veining near the throat of each falls petal; clear boundaries between the yellow and white colors; and a yellow rim surrounding the edges of many petals.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (3 of 3)

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From “Irises, Gladioli, and Shellflowers” in Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:

“The good foliage, large flowers, and noble deportment of Iris pallida may be seen in many of its descendants. This species and I. variegata, a central European species with yellow standards and brown-stippled falls, are believed to have been the principal forerunners of garden irises. The early crosses between them developed mixed purplish or bicolored blooms. In the Victorian catalogs of English nurseryman Peter Barr, these were listed in various ‘species’ classes based on the patterns of their flowers. Lavender to violet blooms, such as the old variety ‘Princess Beatrice‘, were grouped with the pallidas, while yellows and maroons fell among the variegatas. Iris amoena, a strain with white standards and purple falls, was nicknamed the agreeable iris for its pleasant mix of colors. The plicatas bore white blooms frilled with edgings of lavender or purple, as did the elderberry-scented I. sambucina….

“So many hybrids have been made among these old sections that it is impossible now to find one’s way with these antique names. In humble country gardens, one still sees irises that look no different from those painted by Redoute, as they grew for the Empress Josephine at Malmaison….

“‘Madame Chereau‘, a nineteenth-century plicata, may still be seen in the South. An assiduous search through April gardens and countrysides will reassemble several of these old varieties, as well as many more recent hybrids of value.

“During the first half of the twentieth century, intermediate strains of irises received serious attention from breeders for the first time. Several irises from this period are now common denizens of Southern gardens.”

From “Breaking the Lights: Diary Poem”‘ in Memoir: Poems 2007-2016 by Neville Keery:

Pleasures to be taken
In 24 hours of retired domesticity:
Get up to open the downstairs curtains
And lift the blinds before making breakfast.

Eight violet iris heads are ready
To unfurl in the front garden….

Hello!

This is the third 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), and the second post is Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (2 of 3).

The photos in this last post show irises with a typical plicata pattern: the petals of the falls are lightly colored or white near the throat of each blossom, and that white is surrounded by color of increasing intensity with stitching or etching that radiates from the center toward the edges.

The stitched color around the edges is actually a blend of purple and blue, in approximately equal amounts; and the petals are thinner and more translucent than those of the amoena irises in the first two posts. As I mentioned in the last post, the range within which color can be adjusted when editing these plicata images is more limited than the amoenas because of those biological and color characteristics. We can see that in these two color temperature variations…

… where the image on the left is set to a slightly cooler white balance and the image on the right is slightly warmer. With either variation, we lose the subtle appearance of the petal’s blue and purple blend spread across hundreds of individual color cells, with both — especially the warmer one — looking a lot like the colors are too close to a flat, single-toned pastel.

And there are other visual cues that the image’s color balance isn’t correct that can be seen by examining all the color relationships present in either version. First, the standards — which should be close to pure white — show a light blue color cast in the cooler image on the left, and a light yellow color cast in the warmer image on the right. Second, the same color casts are present in the leaves surrounding the flower: they’re too blue or too yellow for the overcast lighting conditions present when I took the photos.

Here’s a way to see how these color variations — which may seem subtle when you view any of the images in isolation — compare to each other. To start, select the middle image below, which is the final color-corrected version.

Now, from the middle image, page to the left to compare it to the cooler version and to the right to compare it with the warmer version. You should then readily see how color correction purifies the whites in the standards and renders more accurate greens — which, because color balance corrections apply to an entire image — has the effect of producing accurate blue and purple tones in the flower’s standards. And if you spend enough time bouncing among the comparisons, you should also see that the center image appears to reveal more detail and a sharper focus — even though detail and sharpness were not adjusted and the only difference between it and the other two is the color balance. Color casts tend to obscure the contrasts our eyes see that we interpret as sharp focus and accurate detail, so the benefits of color correction extend beyond just producing accurate colors.

All this explains why my approach to color correction for photos of botanical subjects has evolved into a “whole image” approach. I aim to represent greens accurately and improve the purity of whites when deciding what color balance best reflects how the plants appeared in the lighting conditions of their natural environment — which also helps properly display the fine variations in color and detail that complex biological structures like irises contain.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!