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

Category: atlanta

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10)

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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!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10)

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From The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim:

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine…. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour….

“The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard…. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea….

“Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…. [Flowers] that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”

From “Flower-de-Luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers,
Or solitary mere,
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers
Its waters to the weir!

Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry
Of spindle and of loom,
And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry
And rushing of the flame.

Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance,
Thou dost not toil nor spin,
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence
The meadow and the lin.

The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner,
And round thee throng and run
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor,
The outlaws of the sun.

The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant,
And tilts against the field,
And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent
With steel-blue mail and shield.

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.

Thou art the Muse, who far from crowded cities
Hauntest the sylvan streams,
Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.

O flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river
Linger to kiss thy feet!
O flower of song, bloom on, and make forever
The world more fair and sweet.

Hello!

This is the first of ten posts (yes, that’s right, ten!) featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery in one lengthy visit toward the end of April. As I mentioned in a previous post (see Studying Japanese Quince): we hope you like irises, because we’re going to spend the next five weeks looking at the photographs and exploring them in different contexts, like their colors, their culture and history, their botanical characteristics, and, sometimes, their appearance in literature (like the excerpt from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the top of this post).

There are 323 photos in the whole series, which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time not only post-processing each image, but organizing them in ways that might make sense for further exploration. As I often do, I’ve arranged the photos by their dominant colors, and ended up with these eight groupings to help me streamline processing in Lightroom and give me some anchors for further research. Here are the groupings in the order I’ll be presenting the photos:

  • Purple and Blue: 50 photos
  • Brown and Gold: 42 photos
  • Purple with Variegated Leaves: 19 photos
  • Purple Plicata: 36 photos
  • White: 38 photos
  • White Standards, Purple Falls: 50 photos
  • Pink Standards, Purple Falls: 26 photos
  • Yellow and Orange: 62 photos

How’s it possible to end up with a large collection like this — which you might describe as so many irises in so little time? I’m glad you asked! There have always been plenty of irises to photograph throughout the gardens, but a few years ago, the caretakers expanded their iris collections by several acres (near the Greenhouse Valley section toward the northeast corner of this map), where they constructed a number of new rectangular garden plots featuring just irises, segregated by color as I’ve done here. And that of course means that if you visit the cemetery during peak iris blooming time (late April or early May), you are pleasantly confronted with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual irises, fully flowering in open spaces, just waiting for you to take their pictures. It’s actually a fascinating addition to a Victorian garden cemetery like Oakland, where plantings are typically associated with various memorial structures and memorial plots, to have this separate set of gardens that have been designed as recently planted independent arrangements of flowers, unaffiliated with the garden’s overall historical design.

The day I took all these photographs started out overcast with some bright but filtered sunlight — my favorite conditions for photographing flowers — but as the morning progressed, the clouds came and went repeatedly so I got to experiment with a variety of lighting conditions including filtered sunlight, stark yellow/white light, and both backlighting and side-lighting. While I’ll sometimes abandon a photoshoot when the lighting conditions change like this, I decided to adapt to it and keep on shooting — in part because we had recurring severe thunderstorms of such frequency in April (continuing through almost all of May) that I thought I might not get another chance to photograph the irises without substantial storm damage. So as you progress through these photos, you’ll see some like this one…

… that adapted to getting storm-battered by adjusting the trajectory of the stem horizontally while still retaining enough upright support to top the stem with a nearly perfectly formed flower. Let’s keep that resilience and ability to adapt to the environment in mind as we move forward with explorations of the iris’s historical persistence, its botanical properties, and its cultural and memorial connections.

I chose Longfellow’s poem to accompany this first post because of the way it seamlessly blends these different connections. “Born in purple, born to joy and pleasance” — for example — doesn’t just describe the color of irises like those in my photographs, but also takes us back to the historical association of irises with royalty or aristocracy. Variations in purple or blue colors and the shape of an iris flower gradually emerged to symbolize royal courts or coats of arms through an association with heraldry, often described as fleur-de-lis (or in Longfellow’s rendering “flower-de-luce”). While there’s some overlap where fleur-de-lis may refer to the shapes of irises or to similarly shaped lilies (abstracting the shape of either flower to a drawing yields similar results), the two remain largely interchangeable in the cultural history of both plants (see Fleur-de-lis Origins for more on that) — and Longfellow clearly intended his poem to describe irises, as he did explicitly in the sixth stanza. That he started out by calling the plant a lily, then reverted to calling it an iris further on, reflects these historical connections.

While Longfellow used evocative colors to induce our understanding of iris history, he also used color to help us see irises in their natural environment, weaving his chosen palette throughout verses in the poem. He was sometimes explicit about that (like the “born in purple” phrase we just discussed), but more often he used an approach that we might call “reflective” by describing the iris’s surroundings. Words and phrases like flame, radiance, green yeomen, burnished, sunbeam, steel-blue, golden rod, celestial azure, and sylvan streams all imply colors that Longfellow found surrounding the irises — yet any of them could be equally attributed to the colors of an iris plant itself, especially when considering how many different colored irises there are, and the enormous variety of colors any individual iris can display. Pick any of my photographs below (or in the rest of this series) and you can find most of these colors; cruise the internet for photos of irises and their descriptions, and you’ll encounter similar phrases in those descriptions; wander for a while among iris gardens at a place like Oakland Cemetery — and whether you’re looking at newly planted acres, or older plantings associated with memorials, it will be quite obvious why the name of the iris itself was derived from the Greek word for rainbow.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Land of Azaleas and Roses

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From “West of the Pacific: Fortune in China and Japan” in Pioneers in Gardening by Miles Hadfield: 

“China, for botanists, was in almost every respect the opposite to North America. It was a densely populated land with an ancient civilisation. The arts, and the cultivation of plants in particular, had been practised for centuries. In the early part of the nineteenth century China was in a particularly bad state of internal confusion, and trading through those few ports used by the Western traders became almost impossible. An English army was sent to change the situation. As a result, in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which gave Britain increased powers of access to the mainland of China, defined British rights in the ports, and gained the island of Hong Kong.

“John Reeves now became the leading member of a committee formed… to engage a collector and despatch him to China…. Robert Fortune, the new superintendent of the hothouse department of the [Royal Horticultural] Society’s garden at Chiswick, was the man chosen….

“On 26th February, 1843, he sailed in the Emu on this pioneering journey to China, the fabulous land of Cathay.

“This is how he described his arrival:

“‘On the sixth of July, 1843, after a passage of four months from England, I had the first view of the shores of China; and although I had often heard of the bare and unproductive hills of this celebrated country, I certainly was not prepared to find them so barren as they really are. Viewed from the sea, they had everywhere a scorched appearance, with rocks of granite and red clay showing all over their surface: the trees are few, and stunted in their growth, being perfectly useless for anything but firewood. A kind of fir-tree (Pinus sinensis) seems to struggle hard for existence… but is merely a stunted bush… Was this, then, the ‘flowery land’, the land of camellias, azaleas and roses, of which I had heard so much in England?'”

From “Avernel” in The Collected Poems of William Alexander Percy by William Alexander Percy: 

From Avernel the hills flow down
     And leave it near the sky,
And it has birds and bells and trees
     And fauns that never die.

When coral-pink azaleas fill
     Its roomy woods with sweet,
And lilac spills of violets wait
     For violet-veined swift feet;

When moths are budded by the oaks’
     Uncrinkling rose and red
And high, high up, green butterflies
     Reveal the poplars’ head;

When shaggy clouds in single bliss
     Blaze up the sea-blue air,
Spilling their shadow-amethyst
     Along the hills’ wide stair;

Then there is singing in the sun
     And whispering in the shade
And dancing till the stars slope down
     Their murmurous arcade…..

Hello!

The first six photos below show the section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens where the rest of the photos were taken. It’s one of my favorite areas in the gardens for several reasons, not the least of which is the variety of plants and flowers that grow together there, to be discovered by simply aiming the camera in any direction. But it’s also one of the quietest and most peaceful sections. You descend into it via a curved roadway surrounded by large trees and shrubs, and your isolation from the sounds of the busy city outside — partially created by brick walls around the property — is as complete as you’d get from noise-cancelling headphones, the kind that still let you hear birds singing, bees buzzing, and the soft whoosh of the wind.

I had taken quite a few photos of azaleas from a different part of the property last year (see Azalea Blooms Aplenty), so for this series, I focused more on the roses than the azaleas. Rose varieties can be a challenge to identify, but these feature a very dark, saturated red petal color with yellow (or sometimes burgundy) stamens and anthers in the center, plenty of unopened late spring buds, and (you’ll have to imagine this part) an intense, heady scent that lets you know they’re roses even before you see that they’re roses.

Thanks for taking a look!