From “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in The World of Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:
“During the 1930s hybridizers, concentrating on eliminating lavender from the so-called pinks of that era, created pastel beauty in tones of orchid, amethyst and lilac; but true pink was tantalizingly elusive. When it appeared through the tangerine pinks, another mystery was added to irisology, for no one has established beyond doubt when or how the tangerine character evolved. The mystery is further compounded by its almost simultaneous appearance in widely separated areas of this country with one report of its appearance in England. But this is a problem for geneticists and cytologists; we can only trace its development from the first recorded variety to the present-day wonders, which eclipse the most extravagant dreams of the pioneer pink breeders….
“By-products were an unexpected bonus from tangerine bearded breeding. Yellows appeared among the progeny of initial crosses for pinks, and hybridizers were amazed and pleased with their quality. These yellows had a sheen and brilliance and a degree of laciness rarely found in conventional yellows.
“[Tell] Muhlestein’s Queen’s Lace, a creamy white deepening to yellow in the center and at the petal edges, is the most lavishly laced iris of 1950 vintage. Its pedigree includes Chantilly twice, Hall’s 42-10 and Gold Ruffles.
“In 1952 [David F.] Hall introduced the first Award of Merit yellows from pink lines: Limelight, a self in canary to greenish yellow with yellow beards; and Temple Bells (from seedlings), a sensation in deep yellow flushed apricot, flaunting bushy, tangerine-red beards. Temple Bells was followed by a sister seedling, Top Flight, with a richer infusion of apricot and brighter beards. Techny Chimes from Bro. Charles Reckamp was the first clear yellow self with tangerine-orange beards.
“Hall’s Golden Garland, from a seedling crossed with Palomino pollen, was the first introduction from tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow, a color pattern that has always been popular….”
From “The Moment” in The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine by Kathleen Raine:
…The sun that rises
Upon one earth
Sets on another.
Swiftly the flowers
Are waxing and waning,
The tall yellow iris
Unfolds its corolla
As primroses wither,
Scrolls of fern
Unroll and midges
Dance for an hour
In the evening air,
The brown moth
From its pupa emerges
And the lark’s bones
Fall apart in the grass.
The sun that rose
From the sea this morning
Will never return,
For the broadcast light
That brightens the leaves
And glances on water
Will travel tonight
On its long journey
Out of the universe,
Never this sun,
This world, and never
Again this watcher.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of irises with yellow standards and white falls that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. They’re among the tallest of the tall bearded irises I find at Oakland; yet even at their impressive three- to four-foot height, they still manage to produce multiple large flowers layered near the tops of very thick stems that never seem to bend even after days of windy spring and summer thunderstorms.
About half of the irises below appear in one of the older sections of Oakland, where the original Victorian garden design philosophy is evident in the blending of sloping landscapes, structures of mixed sizes and shapes dating back to the late nineteenth century, and plantings within memorial structures called grave curbs that echo contained raised gardens built outside of a memorial context. These tall bearded irises are especially suitable for this purpose, as they’ll expand to fill concrete-bordered spaces and tower over them to draw the observer’s attention to the memorial structures. There’s a visual randomness to a scene like this that’s quite different from the more precisely orchestrated landscape design I wrote about in two previous posts, shown in the second and third images below (from Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (3 of 3) and Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (1 of 3)). The three images together illustrate the historical evolution in memorial garden design through the twentieth century that emphasized symmetry while still retaining the same intermixing of natural and constructed elements.
When we zoom in on the flowers produced by these irises, we get to see and introduce a specific color pattern — a variation on the term “amoena.” Recall that the amoena classification describes an iris with white standards and purple or other single-colored falls. These irises reveal the opposite color arrangement with colorful standards and white falls, for which Clarence Mahan’s book Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them gives us a precise definition: “A name applied originally to a natural hybrid or variant of Iris variegata. Now a flower color pattern in which the standards are white and the falls are violet, yellow, pink or some other color. When the standards are colored and falls white, the pattern is called “‘reverse amoena.'”
The condensed excerpt up-top from “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in the book The World of Irises races through the decades between the 1930s and the 1950s to explain how the development of yellow irises with colors like these stemmed from efforts to improve tangerine-colored irises specifically, “tangerine” having been used to describe various orange tones present in many irises used for breeding.
These efforts have their own distinctive thread in the history of iris genetics, detailed in a reproduction (supplemented with images) of the entire chapter I excerpted in the American Iris Society’s article Development of Tangerine Bearded Tall-Bearded Irises. Scroll down on that page to the section “Tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow,” where you’ll encounter photos of three irises next to each other that closely match Oakland’s yellow and white reverse amoenas: Golden Garland (produced in 1957), and Debby Rairdon and May Melody (both produced in 1965). Debby Rairdon, in particular, is a nearly identical visual match to the irises I photographed. That (and my photographs) illustrates how these variants can produce pronounced waves or ruffling in the standards; richly saturated orange beards; distinctive and precise raised-texture veining near the throat of each falls petal; clear boundaries between the yellow and white colors; and a yellow rim surrounding the edges of many petals.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
