From “Iris Genetics” in Garden Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by L. F. Randolph:
“There are two distinct types of color pigments in the flowers of the common garden irises. One is an anthocyanin pigment that is found in the cell sap of the flower and occurs among different varieties in various hues ranging from blue-purple to violet and red-purple. The other is yellow, a plastid pigment occurring in values ranging from very light cream to rich golden yellow. Each of these colors is inherited independently, but they often occur together in the same flower as blends of various kinds.
“When both blue-purple and yellow are present in the same flower, the result is a blending of the two colors. Colors produced by this blending effect may range all the way from light orange-yellow through tans and browns to orange-reds and nearly true reds, depending on the relative amounts of the purple and yellow colors present. Neither pure color completely obscures the other (epistasis) nor is obscured by it (hypostasis). However, if the purple is intense and the yellow is pale, it may be difficult to distinguish the blend from true purple. Similarly, small amounts of purple change pure yellows to dull colored or ‘dirty’ yellows and another generation is required to recover the pure yellow color.
“When making genetic analyses of blends and other combinations of characters it is necessary to deal with each character separately; the geneticist must first determine the effects of individual gene differences. Having done this, it is then possible to proceed with analyses of more complex situations involving the combined effects of two or more genes, as in the case of the purple and yellow blends.”
“The blend or polychrome, one of the most delightful patterns in irises, results from the mixture or infusion of two or more colors in the same parts of the flower.”
Up top, I’ve included two quotations: the first is a scientific explanation describing how irises produce colors and blend them together; and the second is a variation of that explanation that’s easier to take with you when you observe how irises classified as blends show off their delightfully mixed-up colors.
In the first post, I explained four different kinds of lighting I encountered on this photo shoot. That post’s galleries included photos taken in diffused light and in situations where lighting needed to be inverted between background and foreground, like these:
This post’s galleries show the sunny series, where the subject was directly lit by the sun with some spot lighting coming from the side, or where the entire composition was basking in full sun, like these:
I prefer compositions like the first pair, where I’m working with scattered, indirect light. But it was a worthwhile experiment to take more photos in full sun than I usually would, and I can imagine now seeking out more subjects lit like the photo on the left where there’s enough shade to keep the background soft and a little dark but the flower is still allowed to shine.
The one on the right, on the other hand, I think needs a different approach to avoid the blotchy, grassy background that comes across as pressed visually against the iris leaves. I took that photo standing above the irises; on another visit, I think I need to get down to the iris’s level — eye to eye (iris to iris!) — to see if I can bring in some distant blurred background rather than the nearby grass. Of course, the 2026 irises have left town for the hot summer, so I’ll have to take a shot at that next year.
“The iris or fleur-de-lis, Ruskin’s flower of chivalry, ‘with a sword for its leaf and a lily for its heart,’ is a cherished perennial. Alone in spacious hobby gardens it makes a magnificent spring and early summer picture with long drifts of translucent white passing into cream and yellow and pink, lavender, purple and red terminating in masses of seashell and sunset blends….
“The most important iris is, of course, the bearded type, the earliest of which blooms for me about mid-May. In this group, do consider the intermediates which I find so attractive to flank the taller kinds in the border. Of sturdy constitution, they grow from sixteen to twenty-eight inches tall and are, indeed, intermediate in size of flower and height….
“The taller bearded iris have in recent years undergone a transformation which makes the varieties of today a far and joyful cry from the muddy purples and blurred yellows of the plants we knew in childhood as ‘flags.’ Selecting a limited group, however, is a complicated business, for varieties now number in the thousands with a flowering period from mid-May well into June, and heights varying from thirty to fifty inches.
“If you have a rather small layout but wish to feature iris, arrange it so as to simulate depth. I once saw in an almost square plot, with a paved circular center, iris set in skillful gradations in deep triangular corner beds to give perspective. The whites and yellows were planted in the foreground. These have, of course, the strongest visual value. The blues and pinks were behind them with the deeper violets… giving an effect of distance in the background….
“Another good way to lay out an iris garden, large or small, is with elliptical beds with broad paths of grass bisecting an oblong surrounded by some evergreen hedge, or better still a low stone wall made broad enough to sit on….
“When you want to work out pleasing groupings with a bicolor or blended iris, do the way you do when selecting a blouse for a tweed-mixture suit, where you want contrast and not a match. If the tweed is violet with a blue thread, you pick out a blue blouse of the same shade, but if there is a pale yellow line through the tweed, you wear a cream or pale yellow blouse or sweater. In each case you emphasize the secondary tone.”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of multicolor irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of spring this year. There are several varieties of bearded irises represented here — most likely variants of Iris pallida or Iris x germanica — but they’re distinguished from other irises by the overlapping distribution of color combinations in their flower petals. In iris color terminology, they would all be classified as blends (defined as the “combination of two or more colors blended together, whether smoothly or unevenly”) — a useful way of singling them out from their relatives, regardless of their species or variant names.
I took all of the photos on one of those breezy late spring days — the days you relish because you know summer’s oppressive humidity is not too far away. The morning started out mostly cloudy, but the wind was strong enough to push clouds around all during my photo shoot, sometimes changing the lighting entirely between the time I framed a composition and the time I pressed the camera’s shutter button. In similar conditions, I’ll often just wait for the clouds to return and cover the sun, but lights on/lights off happened so frequently I just decided to lean in and go with the flow (double-cliché alert!). Throughout the entire series, I ended up with four identifiable lighting scenarios, represented by these four photos.
The first photo (top left) shows a pair of blended irises in full sun, where the sun is above and behind me, so light is distributed evenly across the entire image. To the extent there are shadows among the leaves or petals, they’re produced by the leaves being turned away from the angle of the sun or where one part of the plant casts shade over another. Lighting like this can expose fine details when the photos are well-focused, though there is some loss of gradient color — the alternating colors appear to begin and end at precise boundaries instead of gradually blending — simply because the sun overpowers less saturated colors. At the same time, shadows can be intrusive or distracting (though can be balanced better through editing), and the background — which has nearly identical brightness to the foreground — is less separated in terms of light and color, so the image tends to appear somewhat flat overall.
The second photo (top right) shows similar lighting for the foreground and subject of the photo, but in this case the light is coming mostly from the left. Because the plant was growing at the edge of a group of tall shrubs, this side-lighting renders the background heavily shadowed. This lighting — which looks a lot like studio spot lighting — produces color and detail similar to that of the flower in the first photo, but provides subject/background separation since the background is naturally darker. This separation — in terms of color, brightness, and focus — also means that the background can be altered to introduce a greater sense of three-dimensionality and implied depth by further blurring and darkening it in Lightroom. The background leaves were actually just a few inches behind the blooming flower; but I edited them to give the impression they were farther away.
With the third photo (bottom left), we begin to see how diffused lighting — when the sun goes behind clouds — can introduce effects that better show off the color characteristics of these irises. Because there’s no strong or harsh lighting, the subtle color variations threaded through each flower petal become more evident, and there are no shadows cast across the petals or leaves. The lighting on the main subject is diffused enough to render fine color variations in the petals, yet strong enough to introduce the kind of glow generated by scattered lighting coming simultaneously from the side and back of a translucent subject. The dark stone wall behind the subject creates some contrast to help show off the flower colors; and the additional light caught by the desiccated flowers at the top of the wall makes each spent bud gleam a bit, like strings of Christmas lights seen from a distance.
The final image (bottom right) demonstrates a common challenge with photo shoots on full sun days when the subject of a photo is partially or fully shaded and the background catches all the light. Here we have a version of that fourth photo before I’ve wrapped up editing. The flower — the subject of the photo — is largely swallowed by the bright background; indeed, it’s possible that your first glance at this photo would barely register that the flower was there. In real life, your eyes and brain compensate for these odd lighting conditions naturally — balancing them out — and you wouldn’t necessarily notice the flower was in the shade. But a camera simply records what was there, rendering the scene as a dark foreground and excessively bright background.
To improve this photo, we want to swap the lighting conditions between the background and foreground. Because the flower and its leaves are sharply focused and the background isn’t, Lightroom can readily distinguish between the subject and background so they can be adjusted independently to reverse the brightness relationship. We can get an image that closes the gap between how our human visual system interprets a scene like this and how a camera captures it — a technique that isn’t complicated and is available in any photo editing app that provides the ability to selectively edit subjects and backgrounds.
Here are the two variations of this photo side-by-side; select either one to compare them in a slideshow. Note the incidental improvements in color in the final version: colors become more intense and saturated because they’re darkened in the background, but lifted out of shadows in the foreground…
… revealing just how many colors are present in a blended-pattern iris like this. And these irises certainly pass the “tweed suit test” described in the last paragraph of The New Perennials Preferred by Helen Van Pelt Wilson at the top of this post: the colors in the flowers complement each other with contrasting patterns, and, for these irises in particular, the flowers mirror the colors and patterns of stone structures in their surroundings.
“The first perennial irises to bloom in spring are several antique bearded types of dwarfish stature…. 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. They are often accompanied by early blue flags, thought to be variants of the same species: on some occasions a blue flower may be seen sporting from the side of an old clump of white I. albicans….
“For as long as Iris albicans has been in gardens, it has suffered confusion with a near relation, the pale white I. florentina(Florentine iris). This famous plant is the preferred source of orris, a fixative used in the perfume industry…. This iris is still raised for this purpose in Tuscany….
“The Florentine iris differs from Iris albicans in its taller, more open spikes of bloom. These carry papery bracts that often dry and turn brown by the time the flowers open. Although the blossoms are larger than those of I. albicans, they open sparsely and are less effective in the garden….
“Early garden writers described Iris florentina as a natural species, but botanists now regard it as an ancient hybrid. Like I. albicans, it has a blue variant. Although less common and prolific in Southern gardens than the early flags, I. florentina tolerates the climate better than many modern bearded irises. It appears occasionally in old gardens and may be seen blooming in April, several weeks after I. albicans finishes for the season.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of white irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. The first post is White Iris Mysteries (1 of 2), where I dug into how the names of white irises like these have evolved, from their historically early designation as Iris florentinathrough many intervening variations to the widely accepted name Iris albicans, then back to Iris florentina again. You might wonder why anyone would even do that research — I know I wondered! But as the picture became clearer, I realized I had unexpectedly come across an event that is rare for someone who is not a scientist, nor a naturalist, nor formally trained as a botanist to encounter: the reclassification of a plant species that was in progress, one not yet universally accepted by experts in the field.
While I’ve often encountered historically varying plant names and written about them here, the context was typically associated with past events: a plant got named decades or centuries ago based on its visual or environmental characteristics or its cultural significance, then got renamed subsequently as more information became available through additional exploration, discovery, and scientific analysis — all stemming from the way knowledge advances in concentric circles or connected spirals rather than in a strictly linear fashion.
For my purposes here, identifying a plant and researching its name changes provided a way to develop a partial and condensed story suitable for writing about on a blog — as opposed, say, to the entire chapters in botany books that might be devoted to seminal events where nomenclature changes occurred. The identification served me as an anchor for a story, that anchor pointed toward other names and other threads I could explore, and I’d pick a few of those threads to pursue and write about them here.
What we have with Iris florentina is a little different than that: the kind of anchor I’m used to launching my research from has been replaced by a contemporary rather than historical event, and it’s just unfolded recently. Its recency is reflected in the excerpt I included at the top of this post — which shows that when Scott Ogden published his book Garden Bulbs for the South in 2007, the plant commonly observed as a White Flag or Cemetery Iris in the southeast could have been either Iris florentina or Iris albicans.
The author goes into a lot of detail (part of which I excerpted last year to support my original identification) about what allegedly separates the two species, encompassing historical understanding of their visual and structural differences — which are now believed to reflect variations based on the plants’ propagation under different growing or overall environmental conditions. That section of his book would have to be rewritten now to accommodate how Kew Plants of the World Online has collapsed the two species into one by treating Iris albicans as a synonym of Iris florentina rather than a separate species. But that part of the story can’t yet be fully told: what I uncovered in the first post establishes a marker reflecting the recent reclassification, something I plan to take another look at when — as is likely — I photograph these white irises again in 2027 and can assess how widely accepted Kew’s reclassification has been, or if the debate “rages on.”
