Category: atlanta

From “Germanicas” in The World of Irises, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“Modern science has shown that most forms of I. germanica (the nomenclatural type of the entire genus), formerly considered a species, are natural intermediate hybrids of unknown origin. The Germanicas are cold-hardy plants of supreme vigor and unequaled persistence. A quick drive through any European or Balkan village shows that ‘Grandma’s Flags’ are still alive and well….

“The Randolphs (1959) brought back a sampling of these plants from the Balkans, Turkey and India, and from several European countries, all much alike — coarse, robust, bitone blue purples. Nothing is known of their origin, or of that of other natural intermediate hybrids that flourish in warmer climates: the whites, Albicans, Kashmiriana and Florentina (which also has a blue form), and the bright red-purple Kochii. Albicans was spread from Yemen throughout the Mediterranean area and into Spain by the Mohammedans, who planted it at their grave sites. It has been found in the Sierra Madre region of Mexico, presumably introduced by the Spaniards.

“These irises left their mark in the art of early times, in the company of angels and Madonnas, where we can remember them with affection and wonder at the changes our modern efforts have wrought.”

From “Bicolors — Bitones — Amoenas” in The World of Irises, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“When an iris fancier hears the term bicolor, in his mind’s eye he sees Amigo’s Guitar, Barcelona, Gala Madrid, Lord Baltimore and other well known irises in this exciting color class. But these varieties are of comparatively recent vintage with pedigrees dating back to the famous [Paul] Cook progenitors of the late 1950s and the 1960s.

“Historically, bicolors, bitones and amoenas were among the first recorded irises….

“[Jean-Nicolas] Lemon, one of the first to grow irises from seeds, listed in his 1840 catalog diploid varieties such as National, light wisteria standards, maroon falls, and Victorine, white standards flecked purple, with falls of blackish purple. During the 1880s [Peter] Barr introduced Perfection, a bitone in light violet and prune purple; [George] Reuthe produced Maori King, an excellent variegata; and [James] Veitch raised Thorbecke, white standards overcast with pale violet, purple falls with reddish bronze reticulations on the hafts….”

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Hello!

This is the eighth 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);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10).

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The irises in the galleries below would be classified as bitone irises, “bitone” referring to a color scheme where an iris’s standards are a lighter tint of the color hue of the falls. We would likely refer to this one, for convenience, as a purple bitone — which would reflect the fact that the falls (and the most dominant color visually) appear to be dark purple, while the standards are a lighter variation of purple, light enough in this case that we could consider the standards pink.

But of course our perception of single colors actually exists on a continuum, and any given color — especially in tonally complex renderings like photographs of irises — expresses itself as a shortcut for the colors that are actually there. When I pass a color picker over either the standards or the falls in this image, for example, Lightroom detects two colors in opposing amounts. The standards and the falls both contain combinations of magenta and purple, with the standards containing more purple than magenta, and the falls containing more magenta than purple. While this may seem like an examination of color suitable for pixel peepers or color nerds, it’s useful in this case to confirm the iris’s color classification. The same colors are present in both the standards and falls, but their relative concentrations result in a flower whose standards appear much lighter in color than the falls — the very definition of a bitone iris, and something that distinguishes irises like this from “bicolor irises” where the color pairs are in different tonal ranges entirely, such as red and yellow.

The texture of the flower also contributes to these color contrasts. Note the difference between the visual (and tactile, if you could touch it) appearance of the standards versus the falls. The standards contain thinner, more translucent petals, that translucence allowing light to pass through the petals, giving them a bit of glow while desaturating their colors. The falls, on the other hand, are much thicker in texture. That thickness reflects the different cellular structure of the falls, where cells are more densely packed than those of the standards, simultaneously creating a cottony appearance while reflecting more saturated colors into the camera’s sensor. The camera effectively “sees” these cells, capturing not only all the subtle color variations, but allowing us to interpret the image as containing the significant differences in texture that are present in the flower itself.

Some comparisons between irises I photographed can help us see how iris enthusiasts evaluate them for color classifications. I’ve previously posted examples of blends (irises with a combination of two or more colors blended together); amoenas (irises with white or near-white standards with colored falls); and plicatas (irises with stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings contrasting with a lighter ground color). Here I’ve placed those three sequentially and added one of the bicolor images to show the differences: a blend, amoena, and plicata from my previous posts followed by a bitone from this post.

Each of these irises represents distinct threads in the development of iris cultivars, much of which occurred in the twentieth century, with the plicata representing the most sophisticated (and most recent) technical accomplishment. They are all visually and genetically much different from irises where a single color dominates — often referred to as “self” irises — such as the predominately purple and blue irises I shared in my first and second posts.

Note, however, what their visual appearance also implies about their genetic similarities: among other things, the amoena and the plicata share similarly colored and textured standards; the amoena and the bitone show both soft and dark purple falls; and the pink and light purple bitone colors also appear in the blend. These isolated examples, of course, could be extended to other irises — some of which you can see by clicking on the links in the excerpts at the top of this post — all of which reveal that their underlying genetic heritage has enabled iris breeders to produce irises in a wide variety of shapes and colors that we still immediately recognize as members of the Iris genus.

This enormous variety also means that horticulturalists planning gardens or memorials like those at Oakland Cemetery can choose irises to match the symbolic representations they wish to create. The plicatas and amoenas, as previously described, were used to build and populate plots where their colors blended smoothly with the stone of surrounding memorial structures. These pink and purple bitones, on the other hand — with taller stems and more saturated colors — are planted to capture attention and direct your eyes or your travels to other sections of the property. Their appearance, color harmonies, contrasts with their surroundings, and even fragrance may halt you briefly, before leading you to follow sidewalks or mount steps to a nearby site of contemplation or memorialization.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “History of Bearded Irises” in Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell: 

“Tall bearded irises, from some species of which our modern garden hybrids have been derived, grow wild only in Europe and Asia, more specifically from Austria through the Balkans and Asia Minor to Arabia. However, as the rhizomes will survive even though dry for months, some of the species and hybrids have been found over a far more extensive area, apparently carried by travelers or settlers. From its home in Arabia Iris albicans was carried along the whole northern coast of Africa… and even into Spain when the Moors invaded that country. Centuries later it was brought over to Mexico and from there by the early settlers to California, where it is still the commonest iris. Often it is found apparently growing wild, but always near former habitations….

“It is now accepted that all the tall bearded hybrids introduced before 1900 were derived from two European species. One of these is Iris pallida, found in numerous forms from the south Tyrol down the Dalmatian coast. This iris is readily distinguished by its glaucous foliage, its short side branches, short perianth tube, and scarious or papery bud spathes; the flowers are of self colors in many shades of lavender and blue, even to purple. The form called plicata, with white ground and lavender or purple edging, has not been found wild but is botanically indistinguishable from Iris pallida and doubtless derives from it. The other parent of our older hybrids is Iris variegata, which extends south and east from Vienna through much of the Balkans. It has thinner, narrower, greener foliage and shorter stems, with two or three lateral heads of flowers; the yellow standards and yellow falls are so often variegated with chestnut or dark red that the general effect is of brown….

“When I. pallida and I. variegata were grown together in gardens and the seed collected from them sown, a wide variation in color and pattern was the result. Even by the end of the sixteenth century there were many distinct varieties….

“For the next couple of hundred years there was evidently no great change in the character of these earlier irises, but in the first half of the nineteenth century nurserymen began paying more attention to them, especially in France. In 1841 [Jean-Nicolas] Lemon issued a catalogue in which he listed a hundred varieties with descriptions. Many of these were still among the standard commercial varieties offered by English and American specialists in the first decade of the twentieth century….

“About 1873 [Peter] Barr issued a descriptive list of his extensive collection, arranging the varieties in groups: aphylla (including forms of germanica), amoena (white standards and purple falls), neglecta (lavender standards and dark falls), pallida (lavender, light and dark blue, and rosy-toned purplish selfs), squalens (forms with blended, often rather dull, combinations of smoky blue and gray or yellow and red), and variegata (clear yellow standards and falls either veined a dark red or of nearly solid ox-blood color)….

“Barr’s classification was adopted and continued in English and American lists into the nineteen-twenties. Even to this day such terms as ‘amoena’ and ‘variegata’ are applied to modern hybrids of these old color patterns.”

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Hello!

This is the seventh 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);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10).

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I included the long excerpt from Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell at the top of this post because it provides a concise yet sweeping history of developments in iris breeding and classification, leading directly to the irises I photographed for the galleries below. That quotation also connects this post to two of my previous posts: the one about white irises descended from Iris albicans, and the one describing the development of plicata color patterns in twentieth-century iris breeding.

The irises I photographed for this post feature the color pattern called “amoena” — a pattern classification Peter Barr used for iris flowers with white standards and purple falls. With twentieth-century improvements in botanical detective work after Barr built his original catalog, some of his terms — like amoena and neglecta — continue to be used as color or pattern descriptions for irises; whereas others like aphylla, pallida, and variegata have evolved into the names of individual iris species like Iris aphylla, Iris pallida, and Iris variegata. And the color pattern “amoena” has itself been adjusted during the same evolutionary period, where it’s now defined as “white or near-white standards, with colored falls.” This definitional change may seem slight at first, but it reflects both more precise observation of iris colors as well as incorporating genetic changes where the standards may vary slightly from pure white, and the falls may include colors other than purple, such as blue, orange, or brown.

Understanding iris color patterns seems to fall into this very philosophical (!!) visual framework: once you see them, you can’t unsee them, nor would you want to. To illustrate that, let’s compare a pair of irises, one from my previous post about the plicata color pattern, and one from this post, which we now know to identify as an amoena.

Since our eyes are quickly drawn to color contrasts, the near-white standards are likely to register for you first. That the plicata’s standards are a slightly creamy white, and the amoena’s standards have some very soft lavender or purple tones, doesn’t take away from considering them “white” — as we all recognize that the color white (whether in nature or not) may contain a range of other muted colors. How much color we detect along with white in photographs (or flowers) like these will vary depending on lighting conditions (especially sun or shade), the ability of our cameras to capture subtle color variations, and more simply, how closely we’re paying attention.

Iris experts would see these standards the same way, but they would then observe the falls, where the differences between the two determine their color pattern classification. The left iris — the plicata — shows a distribution of color in the falls that meets the classic definition of a plicata pattern — “stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings contrasting with a lighter ground color” — that gradually increase in color saturation (while retaining the overall pattern) from the throat of the iris to the edges of the petals. The lighter ground color — the whiter sections near the throat — are themselves not pure white or even just off-white: the camera (and Lightroom) reveal that those regions contain cells (or pixels) containing various shades of very light blue or very light purple.

The flower on the right shows a completely different arrangement of colors. Even though there are many shades of red, purple, and blue among the standards, there is no lighter ground color showing through to create the kind of pattern visible for a plicata. The falls’ colors, while varying tonally, are fully saturated with no breaks or strong contrasts — except the sharp contrast between the falls and the upright standards, that contrast itself being a defining characteristic of an iris classified as an amoena.

Barr didn’t differentiate between amoenas and plicatas in his iris classifications, in part because plicatas required a level of genetic engineering to redistribute selected colors to parts of the iris while suppressing others, that did not exist until well into the twentieth century. While amoenas did exist and were being genetically produced in his era, their shifting definition from “white standards with purple falls” to “white or near-white standards, with colored falls” reflects how iris genetics have changed: today’s amoenas can be engineered to contain a wider range of color variations in both the standards and the falls than Barr would have been able to observe. But we can observe them, and enjoy how these fascinating color variations make one type of iris so different from another. And this broader definition allows us to classify and appreciate a wide range of color varieties that have more recently been genetically engineered for our gardens, while maintaining the essential visual characteristics (and their definition) intact.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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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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