“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….
“The earliest bearded iris hybrids date back to the early 1800s and were raised in the UK and France, from seedlings selected by nurserymen from naturally occurring open-pollinated crosses. It soon became apparent that an incredible number of variations could occur, so by the beginning of the twentieth century, nurseries were embarking seriously on full-blown breeding programmes. As a consequence, the bearded iris rapidly developed beyond all recognition and by the mid-twentieth century hundreds of new plants were being introduced each year.”
A white iris blossom floats in the turquoise dish, its beauty never more apparent, its pristine ruffles pure.
Iris clusters vie for space across the flower bed multicolored in their glory. The one I clipped today,
before me on the table, holds perfection in its petals and treats my eyes to all the beauty they can hold.
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On a day forecasted to be the hottest of the year so far — with temperatures expected to rise to the small 100s — I thought it would be nice to assemble and post this collection of soft-white iris photos, originally taken on a shady day. I feel cooler already!
“Brown, like black, has an allure for color-crazed folks keen on one-upping the gardening neighborhood. Sure, everyone has some bronze-colored mums in September, but who has cinnamon and chocolate and copper in May other than an iris lover?
“Most brown irises trace back to antecedents like Iris variegata and a Havana-brown tall bearded from France called ‘Jean Cayeux’ (Cayeux 1931). But it was an Oregon doctor, Rudolph Kleinsorge, who really transformed the iris world, with irises like ‘Aztec Copper’ (1939), ‘Daybreak’ (1941), and ‘Goldbeater’ (1944). These new color breaks took the iris world by storm. Kleinsorge’s crowning achievement, ‘Tobacco Road’ (1942), was a selection from a three-way cross between his own ‘Far West’ (1936), ‘Jean Cayeux’, and ‘Aztec Copper’. Despite winning one of only three-ever-awarded AIS Board of Director’s Medals and being one of the most important tall bearded irises of the 20th century, ‘Tobacco Road’ is impossibly rare in cultivation and perhaps even extinct.”
“[Brown] is not found in a rainbow or on a simple color wheel; making it requires darkening and graying down yellows, oranges, and some impure reds, or mixing together the three artists’ primaries — red, yellow, and blue. That there is no bright or luminous brown led to its being despised by both medieval artists and modernists. For medieval artists, who disliked mixing on principle and saw the glory of God reflected in the use of pure precious materials like ultramarine and gold, brown was inherently corrupt….
“Like some blacks, browns have long been used by artists for underdrawings and sketches. Bister, a dark but not particularly colorfast material, usually prepared from the tarry remains of burned beech wood, was popular. Other notable examples include the yellowy sienna from Italy and umber, which is darker and cooler. A blood-brown earth known as sinopia, after the port it came from, was beloved too….
“The artistic period most associated with browns, and which valued them most for their own sake, came after the first flush of the Renaissance. The principal figures in the works of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt stand out like bright islands in spaces full of capacious shadow. So much shadow demanded an extraordinary array of brown pigments — some translucent, others opaque; some warm, others cool — to prevent the works from looking featureless and flat. Anthony van Dyck, a Dutch artist active in the first half of the seventeenth century, was so skilled with one pigment — cassel earth, a kind of peat — that it later became known as ‘Vandyke brown.'”
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There are few things in photography that I find as fascinating as studying color, and the irises I encounter on my trips to Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens give me access to a range of colors offered by no other flower. When I come home with several hundred new iris photos, I organize them by color and work on images with similar colors together — because, most likely, those groups were taken in the same area of the gardens and will have approximately the same lighting conditions in addition to their color tones.
Mostly, organizing iris photos this way is straightforward: one of each iris’s colors is often dominant (like orange, peach or pink, purple, white, yellow, or black) or the color differentiation between standards and falls is obvious (like the white and purple, or yellow and burgundy combinations, on a bicolor iris). But there are always some, like those in these photographs, that display such a wide range of colors throughout the flower that I set them aside from the rest. These blended colors are fascinating on their own, and Lightroom finds all the colors whose color channels the software supports in each of the flowers in the photos below: red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta.
I included a quotation at the top of this post about brown irises, since about half of these — the ones after the double row of asterisks below — show distinct shades of brown (blending with orange or purple) in each flower’s crown. The others, at first glance, certainly don’t seem to be brown, having purple, pink, yellow, or orange shades instead — yet here are the web colors I extracted from those images using a utility I have called ColorSlurp:
When broken down this way, it’s easy to see why we may call irises like this brown, since so many of its constituent colors are shades of brown — with some sliding toward yellow, orange, or purple. In individual irises like these, you can see generations of breeding to produce new colors, with wild or native irises (typically purple, yellow, or white in color) bred to create complex tonal combinations. if you would like to see some similar irises — which may very well be related to these, given the historical relationships described above — click the links in the top quotation. I found all the irises mentioned at the Historic Iris Preservation Society web site.
“Various cultivated forms of Iris pallida, including ‘Dalmatica’ and its nearly identical pretenders, grow over most of North America in gardens and cemeteries, around old abandoned buildings, along country roads, city streets, and major highways. In McLean, Virginia… one form decorates the pathways outside several banks and real estate offices. It seems to flourish with no dividing or other cultivation. These irises are a link to the past, a symbol of a time when a fragrant pastel violet iris with handsome foliage was the height of beauty….
“Almost all 19th-century garden irises were forms or hybrids of two European species: Iris pallida and Iris variegata. The discovery of several natural tetraploid tall bearded irises in the latter decades of the 19th century, especially Iris trojana, Iris mesopotamica, Iris cypriana, and the cultivar known as ‘Amas’ (also known as Iris macrantha), made it possible for iris hybridizers to breed garden irises with double the diploid number of chromosomes. Almost all modern tall bearded irises are tetraploids, meaning they have four sets of chromosomes.”
“Iris lovers heart blue. Actually, I think people heart blue. We’ve been long lost on a quest for true blue in nature, and when we do encounter it, it holds us in deep rapture. Fortunately for iris lovers that rapturous experience storms the garden each spring, laden with ruffles and sassy, audacious flowers….
“[Blue] covers a lot of ground, describing the world from the ocean to the sky. Color experts would distinguish true spectrum blue (105C on the RHS Colour Chart) from the violet-blue group of colors we register as wisteria blue, cornflower, bluebird, medium blue, and so on….
“The bearded iris world sports thousands of blue irises throughout the range just described, but spectrum blue bearded irises are inexplicably rare, with only one confirmed report in the Bulletin of the American Iris Society, from Virginia hybridizer Don Spoon, of its turning up in a seedling patch….”
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Here we have a collection of similarly-colored irises, three different variants that were showing off their good-mood blues a couple of weeks ago at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. All of them would fall under the generic term “bearded iris” for obvious reasons (they have bitty beards!) but beyond that, I can more precisely identify only the first thirteen — as Iris pallida, which can also refer to other irises of varying appearance and color. I’ve previously photographed this iris along with Iris pallida variegata, and comparing the two made them easier to identify.
This particular iris pallidahas flowers that are mostly pale (“pallida”) blue, and its leaves are green; Iris pallida variegata has flowers with the same structure but are more violet or purple than blue, and its distinctive bi-color leaves have a green and yellow (sometimes white) stripe. I realized when working on this set that I had not seen any Iris pallida variegata blooms this year, though had seen their unique leaves. On a trip back to the gardens this weekend, I hunted them down again and discovered that the plants produced plenty of leaves but no flowers (and there were no post-flowering empty stems) so I guess they’re taking a 2024 spring vacation.
Like the black irises I wrote about just last week (see Black Iris Variations and Observations) whose blue and purple colors could be flipped, the thirteen photos below could be rendered in either light blue or light purple; and, indeed, if you look at them on a device that has the ability to reduce blue light, you can see how they would look in the alternate color. But since Lightroom detects much more blue than purple in this case, I’ve adjusted them to look as I think someone would see them in “real life”: mostly blue, with touches of light purple that are more evident as you lean in (or the camera zooms in) to see greater detail and more variations in color. Still the extent of blue versus purple varies for each flower; and any of them may appear more blue or more purple depending on their actual colors, growing conditions, and lighting. To see some additional variations, try this image search for “blue iris pallida.”
The remaining flowers — especially the extra-fluffy, nearly translucent ones in the middle — registered very little purple, so they are, I think, closer to the true blue or “spectrum blue” mentioned in the second quotation at the top of this post. If you’d like to read more about the color blue in nature — and an explanation for its rarity relative to other colors — the article Why is the Color Blue so Rare in Nature? provides a good overview of blue’s distinguishing characteristics.
