From “The Role of Irises in Our Gardens” in Magic of Irises by Barbara Perry Lawton:
“The magic of irises in our gardens lies in their singular beauty, their linear quality and the ease with which they can be grown. The glory of the flowers and the brilliances and subtleties of their many colors endear the plants to gardeners…. Few perennials bring as much reliable color to garden beds and borders. Few are so adaptable to a wide range of soil and environmental conditions….
“Irises have grown in American gardens since the earliest of times and probably came to the Colony of Virginia with Englishwomen who arrived in 1619. The Persian iris is in the old plant list for the governor’s garden when Williamsburg was first planned in the seventeenth century. The bearded irises from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, commonly called the German irises, crossed the Atlantic and were welcome introductions to American gardens wherever the colonists settled. The long congruent history of irises with humankind adds to the appeal of these old favorites of the perennial world….
“In form, irises range all the way from the single-stemmed grace of the bulbous Dutch iris to the well-known spear sheaves of the bearded irises to the thick clumps of the Siberian irises. [There] are all of the gradations of form in between these as well….
“As to flower form, again the range is wide. The standard petals may be upright or spreading. The falls may point downward or spread out like a saucer. The falls may have beards, crests, or neither. The size of the flowers may be miniature or larger than a tea saucer. Some iris flowers are heavily ruffled while others have no ruffles at all. The variety of flower forms is wide indeed, offering something for every taste.
“When it comes to color and patterns of color, the genus Iris is hard to beat. The flowers, named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow, fulfill the promise of that name better each year as both professional and amateur iris breeders come up with new variations on the theme. Colors in irises run from the whites through yellows and oranges to pinks to blues, lavenders, purples and purple-reds. Pure geranium red is the only color that is not in the iris palette. There are the palest of pastels and the most robust rich shades imaginable. There are bicolored, spotted, blotched and speckled iris flowers. Some iris flowers have standards and falls of different colors. It is difficult to think of a color or color combination that you can’t find among the irises.”
From “Reaching the Audience” by Pattiann Rogers in Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener by Sondra Zeidenstein:
We will start with a single blue dwarf iris
Appearing as a purple dot on a hairstreak
Butterfly seen in a distant pine barrens and proceed
Until we end with a single point of purple spiraling
Like an invisible wing in the center of the flower
Making fact.
We will investigate a stand of blue flags crimsoned
By the last sun still showing over the smoky edges
Of the ravine and illustrate in sequence the glazing
Of those iris by the wet gold of an early dawn.
We will survey a five-mile field of purple iris
Holding bristle-legged insects under the tips
Of their stamens and measure the violet essence
Gathered at the bases of their wings and devote
One section to a molecule of iris fragrance
Preserved and corked in a slender glass.
There will be a composition replicating the motion
Of the iris rolling sun continually over its rills
And another for the stillness of the iris sucking ivory
Moonlight through its hollows making ivory roots.
There will be photographs in series of the eyes
Of a woman studying the sepals of an iris
In a lavender vase and a seven-page account of the crested
Iris burning at midnight in the shape of its flame….
Hello!
This is the first of three posts with new images of irises from Oakland Cemetery that I photographed earlier this year. For these three posts, I’ve assembled those irises whose colors fall in the blue to purple ranges, whose forms and color variations are reflected in both of the excerpts I included above. I titled this series “Iris Purpleness” because I didn’t know “purpleness” was a word until today, and I thought it sounded funny. It makes sense though (“redness” is a word, after all), and it even has a plural form — “purplenesses” — that I encourage you to try using in a sentence. 🙂
Here are the four varieties appearing in this three-part series. The top two would likely be classified as self irises — irises whose standards and falls produce colors in the same, or nearly the same, ranges. The first one demonstrates mostly blue with purple undertones, and the second reverses that color relationship, emphasizing a rich purple/violet color with blue undertones (and a small blue beard, which is atypical for the irises I find at Oakland). The iris on the right has petals that are quite thick and textured, producing a ruffled edge and a quality of reflecting its rich colors into the camera. As I was assembling these galleries, I puzzled for a while about why I never photographed the dwarf irises in the background of that second scene, but didn’t come up with an answer. Weird how something like that happens.
The iris on the bottom left is one I encounter every year at Oakland, whose colors demonstrate that of a bitone iris, a description that applies when an iris’s standards (which are large and prominent in this iris) are a lighter hue of the same color as its falls. In other words, this iris’s falls are a dark purple/violet, and its standards are a lighter shade of the same color combination. In this case, the standards are also thinner in texture and more translucent, so more light passes through them and makes those standards appear to glow, especially when light passes through them at an angle — which it did at the time I took these pictures.
Irises like those in the bottom right photograph strike me as a most intriguing color combination, where the petals display blends of dark blue, dark purple, and — especially in the unopened buds — a color that is close to pure black. Black in irises is both fascinating and visually contestable, as what we see (or what the camera captures) as black is difficult to differentiate as that color, or as the absence of color caused by shadows or contrasting lighting. That is, what we see as black might be very dark purple or very dark blue (or even very dark red), or it might be that plus lack of light on what we’re observing. I approached this topic a couple of years ago — see Black Iris Variations and Observations from 2024 — where I now think I overemphasized the black tones in these same irises over their subtle blue, purple, and black color relationships.
If you’d like to see other examples of black in irises, take a look at the Historic Iris Gallery on the Historic Iris Preservation Society website, and set the gallery’s filters for Standard Colors or Fall Colors to “Black/Near Black.” The gallery photos will include irises that do indeed look like they’re black or very dark gray, but will also show how many that get referred to as black are similarly colored to those I photographed with highly saturated purple, blue, and red tones that visually (or photographically) are so close to pure black that they’re named that way. Two of the irises from that gallery in particular — Night Ruler and Black Watch — are a lot like the purple, blue, and black color blends I find at Oakland, though of course I have no way to assign those variant names with certainty.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
