From “A Cavalcade of Color” in Irises by Harry Randall:
“Just as bearded irises have been improved in form and habits of growth, so they have been improved in colour; and I must try to deal with this aspect of my subject. I emphasize, however, that I make no claim to be any kind of an authority on colour values; and if this book should ever be glanced at by a professor at the Slade or a dye expert at a nylon factory I hope that my amateurishness will be laughingly overlooked. My justification for touching on the subject is that I am not colour blind, and that for many years I have watched with pleasant surprise the improvement in the colouring of the iris family.
“One of the first irises I ever bought was one introduced in France in I912 Deuil de Valery Mayet. It was a smoky blend the like of which I had never seen before, and at the time I thought it wonderful; but I soon decided that it was about the dullest flower in my garden. Other irises succeeded it, each batch being more colourful than the previous one; and when Golden Hind appeared in the 1930s my desire for brightness seemed satisfied at last. But I soon found that masses of “hot’ yellow irises in the border can be garish, and I began to appreciate the cooler colours all the more. At one time I liked self-coloured irises, but then some of the bitones appealed to me, and finally the blends. Probably every iris grower has these changing preferences, and I mention the fact here to indicate to beginners that as their tastes inevitably change they will have tremendous interest and fun in the process.”
From “Yellow” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:
“I think we take yellow for granted in the iris world, despite the fact that clarifying it from sodden and sullied to lustrous and sparkling was one of the greatest challenges of iris breeding in the 20th century. Many have credited the venerable ‘W. R. Dykes’ (Dykes-Orpington 1926), the iris named for the godfather of the genus, with starting it all — stirring frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic for sun-kissed tints on iris flowers.
“The range of yellow could cover continents in geographical terms. From the palest butter and white blend like that of ‘Melted Butter’ (Fan 1994) to the eye-searing, dark cadmium yellow blossoms of ‘Throb’ (Weiler 1991), yellow unspecifically describes many colors….”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with images of some fascinating yellow irises that I photographed in late spring at Oakland Cemetery. I posted a few photographs of this same iris and wrote about its unique characteristics (especially its intense yellow color) last year — see Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10) — and as I reread that post, I think it holds up pretty well. I won’t repeat too much of what I wrote last year, except to note that I still think it’s quite likely that these irises are either the ‘Throb’ cultivar (developed in 1991) mentioned in that previous post or a very close relative, as the color production, the flower shape, and the degree of flower petal ruffling seem a close match.
Among the images below, I’ve included five at the beginning that show the stretch of landscaping where these irises live, their only planting at Oakland. Those photographs — taken from decreasing distances — help to show not only their height (which gets them classified as tall bearded irises), but also their extravagant leaves, many of which exceed the height of the flowers and demonstrate substantial horizontal spread. The leaves are as interesting as the flowers in terms of both color and form: their length causes them to fold over gracefully and often overlap in curved lines, and their colors — even on the same plant — are never just a single green, but demonstrate pure greens, yellow greens, and various shades of blue or aqua. While aqua-colored leaves are common among irises, the presence of several different greens along with aqua-blue of such intensity is less common.
I was fortunate that the sun was filtered from behind clouds throughout most of this photoshoot. That helped reveal the multicolored leaves I just described; but also enabled me to take additional photographs of the flowers with more accurate color capture. In full sun, this iris is almost impossible to photograph well: the intensity of the yellow flower petals combined with yellow light from the sun create a dominating yellow color cast that permeates the entire composition. While that’s somewhat manageable after the fact in Lightroom, it’s difficult to eliminate entirely. And it’s compounded by the physical structure of this iris’s flower petals: they’re not translucent like many irises and the petals themselves are thicker than is common. They’re opaque, in effect, so all the color they produce is bounced back into the camera’s sensor, flooding it with bright, highly saturated yellow.
Even in the preferable lighting conditions I just described, these irises demonstrate such intense yellow color that I reduced it by half in Lightroom on every one of these photos. The first photo below (on the left) shows that color saturation reduced by half…
… and the second one shows the results if I attempt to remove all the yellow color in Lightroom — setting yellow saturation to -100 (which is as low as you can go). And yet yellow remains, a pleasant pale yellow variation or vanilla-yellow blend that you might find among some irises — but not these, which are the yellowest of yellows, with orange highlights and orange beards. Temporarily reducing it that much is instructive, though, as it helps reveal where the flower contains orange color and where there are transitions between yellow and orange — color relationships that post-processing should retain to accurately represent the distinctive colors of these irises.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
