Category: oakland cemetery

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (2 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (1 of 2)

Yellow and White Bearded Irises (2 of 2)

Thanks for taking a look!

Iris pallida ‘variegata’

June 15, 2023, 11:52 am June 15, 2023 0

From “Over the Rainbow: Bearded Irises and Your Garden” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“Pileated, variegated, and broken-colored are all adjectives used to describe the splashed and streaked flowers of bearded irises under the likely influence of a transposon (a jumping gene). Though the genetic history remains a little foggy, what matters most is that this phenomenally novel genre has rightly taken the bearded iris world by storm.

“Scandalous-looking, no doubt, these irises have graced the gardens of avant-garde iris lovers since the 1970s. But like many new trends seized upon by stylish people, broken-colored irises have been around longer than most realize. A ‘Zebra’, in commerce in the 1890s, reportedly had white flowers with blue stripes throughout the standards and falls, but that name is now reserved for the familiar cultivar of Iris pallida and its variegated foliage.”

From “Sea Iris” by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street:

Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.

Hello!

Iris pallida ‘variegata’ is known by several common names, including Sweet Iris, Dalmatian Iris, Zebra Iris, and simply Striped Iris. “Variegata” refers to the variation that produces bi-color leaves — which may be white and green, or yellow and green — and the leaves are quite striking on their own.

There’s one large batch of these irises at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, and I try to visit with them every spring. For many of the photos below, I pulled my lens back to produce wider-angled images — because the leaves seemed to demand as much attention as the iris blooms themselves. There are so many leaves — a multitude more leaves per plant than most other irises — that they can easily be positioned as background or foreground elements, or kept at the same focal plane as the flower. I tried a few at each of these positions — and I think my favorites below are actually those where the flower and the surrounding leaves are both in focus.

My previous iris posts for this season are:

Yellow and White Bearded Irises (1 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (2 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (1 of 2)

My Garden in Autumn and Winter.

Thanks for taking a look!

Yellow and White Bearded Irises (2 of 2)

June 11, 2023, 10:28 am June 11, 2023 2

From “Developing the Flower” in Iris: The Classic Bearded Varieties by Claire Austin:

“Over the past century the development of the bearded iris has been tremendous. At the beginning of this period the flowers came in only white, yellow or purple, or occasionally a combination of all three colours. This often resulted in a murky blend of muted shades. Since then, hybridizers have expanded the range into a vast rainbow of colours — and as the number of tones has increased, so has the size of the flower. Because of this, the petals, which once were smooth and delicate in shape, are now of necessity ruffled, fluted and thick in substance.”

From “The Iris Beds” in My Garden in Summer by E. A. Bowles:

“Here at the corner facing the Lunatic Asylum beds and the large Ivy-covered Yew, the mixture [of irises] is mostly composed of yellows, bronzes, and whites. Of the former Gracchus is one of the best, and so free in growth and flowering that it needs no care; the daffodil-yellow standards are as bright a yellow as any Iris could produce, while the falls are netted with crimson and white and so proclaim it a form of I. variegata, but in size and colouring it quite eclipses its parent, who has to live a little further along round the bend to avoid being put to shame by her handsome child.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring yellow and white irises from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens; the first post is Yellow and White Bearded Irises (1 of 2).

The second quotation above is from one of the three delightful seasonal botany books written by Edward Augustus Bowles (1865-1954). You may remember his Lunatic Asylum since I wrote about it previously (see Winter Shapes: Corkscrew Hazel) — and it’s always fun to me to find a relevant quotation from his books for one of my posts. I like his writing style, because — even in the short selection above — you get a sense of the pure joy he feels observing and writing about what he sees in his gardens. The three books are available from Books to Borrow at the Internet Archive, at these links:

My Garden in Spring,

My Garden in Summer, and

My other iris posts for this season are:

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (2 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (1 of 2)

Thanks for taking a look!

Yellow and White Bearded Irises (1 of 2)

June 7, 2023, 10:48 am June 7, 2023 2

From “The Nineteenth Century Florist” in Old Fashioned Flowers by Sacheverell Sitwell:

“The colour of Irises has been changed and extended almost out of recognition during the last thirty years. Hybridization from so many varieties and species, newly discovered, has been immensely facilitated. Irises have, as well, become more scented than they were before….

“Irises are larger than they ever were before: they are deeper, brighter or paler in colour, while their markings are such as the most fanatic of the old florists would have approved. Within its limits nothing has been found impossible of realization….

“The wonderful colour faculty of the Iris, which possesses in its species, or primitives as they could be called, such depth and brilliance, such texture and translucency, made a sure guide, we may think, to the dormant proclivities of the flower.”

From A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“Bearded irises aren’t stalwarts of the gardening tradition for nothing. Hike on over to your local cemetery, and you’ll probably find a clump of bearded irises, purple or yellow, maybe white, growing effortlessly along the fence or atop a gravesite. They probably get mowed off in June each year, and yet for decades they’ve persisted. Sure, they don’t make them all this tough anymore, and like everything, irises do best with some care and attention. For bearded irises, this basically means keeping them groomed and divided, in a sunny, well-drained spot.”

Hello!

This is the first of two posts featuring yellow and white irises from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The white irises were the first ones I encountered this year, and I photographed them as far back as early March. Many sustained damage from a mid-March freeze and never quite fully recovered, leading to blossoms that opened partially or opened with missing or desiccated flower petals. Yet they are still unmistakeable as irises, and white — like yellow — has a way of showing off their shapes and textures as the lighter colors alternate with shadowy detail.

My previous iris posts for this season are:

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (2 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (1 of 2)

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (2 of 2)

Thanks for taking a look!

Purple and Violet Iris Mix (2 of 2)

June 4, 2023, 12:27 pm June 4, 2023 14

From “The Virtuous Plants” in The Origins of Garden Plants by John Fisher:

“The Iris was said to have been first adopted as an emblem in the sixth century by King Clovis of the Franks, after a clump of Iris pseudacorus, Yellow Water Flag, had shown him where he could ford a river and so escape from a superior force of Goths….

“It was revived as an emblem, the Fleur de Louis, by Louis VII of France in 1147 when he set off on the disastrous second crusade. It figured at one time in our own royal coat-of-arms and still appears on the dials of non-digital compasses to show the way to the north. But the Iris was used in medicine as well as in heraldry. It was said to be a remedy against dropsy, jaundice, the ague, stones in the kidney and a number of less serious though distressing complaints. The blue garden variety, Iris germanica, was cultivated even in the ninth century by Walafrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau, the famous monastery on Lake Constance, and no doubt soon spread to gardens this side of the channel.”

From “In Dreams” by Dylan Thomas in The Poems of Dylan Thomas:

And in her garden grow the fleur de lys,
    The tall mauve iris of a sleeping clime.
Their pale, ethereal beauty seems to be
    The frail and delicate breath of even-time.
And night, who stooped to kiss the pallid leaves
    To that strange colour, sighing gently, grieves
For her who walks within her garden-close.
    Somehow it seems, amid the evening haze,
That in her garden, rather than the days,
    There should be night for ever, and no rose,
But only iris on their slender stalks
Along the borders of the garden-walks.

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring irises in shades of purple and violet from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Purple and Violet Iris Mix (1 of 2), and my previous iris posts for this season are:

Irises in Pink, Peach, and Splashes of Orange (1 of 2)