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From “History of Bearded Irises” in Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell: 

“Tall bearded irises, from some species of which our modern garden hybrids have been derived, grow wild only in Europe and Asia, more specifically from Austria through the Balkans and Asia Minor to Arabia. However, as the rhizomes will survive even though dry for months, some of the species and hybrids have been found over a far more extensive area, apparently carried by travelers or settlers. From its home in Arabia Iris albicans was carried along the whole northern coast of Africa… and even into Spain when the Moors invaded that country. Centuries later it was brought over to Mexico and from there by the early settlers to California, where it is still the commonest iris. Often it is found apparently growing wild, but always near former habitations….

“It is now accepted that all the tall bearded hybrids introduced before 1900 were derived from two European species. One of these is Iris pallida, found in numerous forms from the south Tyrol down the Dalmatian coast. This iris is readily distinguished by its glaucous foliage, its short side branches, short perianth tube, and scarious or papery bud spathes; the flowers are of self colors in many shades of lavender and blue, even to purple. The form called plicata, with white ground and lavender or purple edging, has not been found wild but is botanically indistinguishable from Iris pallida and doubtless derives from it. The other parent of our older hybrids is Iris variegata, which extends south and east from Vienna through much of the Balkans. It has thinner, narrower, greener foliage and shorter stems, with two or three lateral heads of flowers; the yellow standards and yellow falls are so often variegated with chestnut or dark red that the general effect is of brown….

“When I. pallida and I. variegata were grown together in gardens and the seed collected from them sown, a wide variation in color and pattern was the result. Even by the end of the sixteenth century there were many distinct varieties….

“For the next couple of hundred years there was evidently no great change in the character of these earlier irises, but in the first half of the nineteenth century nurserymen began paying more attention to them, especially in France. In 1841 [Jean-Nicolas] Lemon issued a catalogue in which he listed a hundred varieties with descriptions. Many of these were still among the standard commercial varieties offered by English and American specialists in the first decade of the twentieth century….

“About 1873 [Peter] Barr issued a descriptive list of his extensive collection, arranging the varieties in groups: aphylla (including forms of germanica), amoena (white standards and purple falls), neglecta (lavender standards and dark falls), pallida (lavender, light and dark blue, and rosy-toned purplish selfs), squalens (forms with blended, often rather dull, combinations of smoky blue and gray or yellow and red), and variegata (clear yellow standards and falls either veined a dark red or of nearly solid ox-blood color)….

“Barr’s classification was adopted and continued in English and American lists into the nineteen-twenties. Even to this day such terms as ‘amoena’ and ‘variegata’ are applied to modern hybrids of these old color patterns.”

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Hello!

This is the seventh of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10).

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I included the long excerpt from Iris for Every Garden by Sydney Bancroft Mitchell at the top of this post because it provides a concise yet sweeping history of developments in iris breeding and classification, leading directly to the irises I photographed for the galleries below. That quotation also connects this post to two of my previous posts: the one about white irises descended from Iris albicans, and the one describing the development of plicata color patterns in twentieth-century iris breeding.

The irises I photographed for this post feature the color pattern called “amoena” — a pattern classification Peter Barr used for iris flowers with white standards and purple falls. With twentieth-century improvements in botanical detective work after Barr built his original catalog, some of his terms — like amoena and neglecta — continue to be used as color or pattern descriptions for irises; whereas others like aphylla, pallida, and variegata have evolved into the names of individual iris species like Iris aphylla, Iris pallida, and Iris variegata. And the color pattern “amoena” has itself been adjusted during the same evolutionary period, where it’s now defined as “white or near-white standards, with colored falls.” This definitional change may seem slight at first, but it reflects both more precise observation of iris colors as well as incorporating genetic changes where the standards may vary slightly from pure white, and the falls may include colors other than purple, such as blue, orange, or brown.

Understanding iris color patterns seems to fall into this very philosophical (!!) visual framework: once you see them, you can’t unsee them, nor would you want to. To illustrate that, let’s compare a pair of irises, one from my previous post about the plicata color pattern, and one from this post, which we now know to identify as an amoena.

Since our eyes are quickly drawn to color contrasts, the near-white standards are likely to register for you first. That the plicata’s standards are a slightly creamy white, and the amoena’s standards have some very soft lavender or purple tones, doesn’t take away from considering them “white” — as we all recognize that the color white (whether in nature or not) may contain a range of other muted colors. How much color we detect along with white in photographs (or flowers) like these will vary depending on lighting conditions (especially sun or shade), the ability of our cameras to capture subtle color variations, and more simply, how closely we’re paying attention.

Iris experts would see these standards the same way, but they would then observe the falls, where the differences between the two determine their color pattern classification. The left iris — the plicata — shows a distribution of color in the falls that meets the classic definition of a plicata pattern — “stippled, dotted, peppered, or stitched markings contrasting with a lighter ground color” — that gradually increase in color saturation (while retaining the overall pattern) from the throat of the iris to the edges of the petals. The lighter ground color — the whiter sections near the throat — are themselves not pure white or even just off-white: the camera (and Lightroom) reveal that those regions contain cells (or pixels) containing various shades of very light blue or very light purple.

The flower on the right shows a completely different arrangement of colors. Even though there are many shades of red, purple, and blue among the standards, there is no lighter ground color showing through to create the kind of pattern visible for a plicata. The falls’ colors, while varying tonally, are fully saturated with no breaks or strong contrasts — except the sharp contrast between the falls and the upright standards, that contrast itself being a defining characteristic of an iris classified as an amoena.

Barr didn’t differentiate between amoenas and plicatas in his iris classifications, in part because plicatas required a level of genetic engineering to redistribute selected colors to parts of the iris while suppressing others, that did not exist until well into the twentieth century. While amoenas did exist and were being genetically produced in his era, their shifting definition from “white standards with purple falls” to “white or near-white standards, with colored falls” reflects how iris genetics have changed: today’s amoenas can be engineered to contain a wider range of color variations in both the standards and the falls than Barr would have been able to observe. But we can observe them, and enjoy how these fascinating color variations make one type of iris so different from another. And this broader definition allows us to classify and appreciate a wide range of color varieties that have more recently been genetically engineered for our gardens, while maintaining the essential visual characteristics (and their definition) intact.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “White Flags” in Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:

“The first perennial irises to bloom in spring are several antique bearded types of dwarfish stature. Because their height is modest, they are usually included in the median iris group… in modern classifications. 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….”

From “A White Iris” by Pauline B. Barrington in The Melody of Earth: An Anthology of Garden and Nature Poems, selected by Gertrude Moore Richards:

Tall and clothed in samite,
Chaste and pure,
In smooth armor, —
Your head held high
In its helmet
Of silver:
Jean D’Arc riding
Among the sword blades!

Has Spring for you
Wrought visions,
As it did for her
In a garden?

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Hello!

This is the sixth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10).

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As I explained in the last post, irises are often categorized across several dimensions, reflecting their botanical structures, shapes, or colors. The plants in this post would be considered white irises, with a finer distinction applied to the first six as “cream” because of the light orange tones distributed throughout their petals. They are all likely variants of Iris albicans — an iris commonly referred to as “white flag” (as in the quotation at the top of this post) or as the “cemetery iris.” As they’re often associated with both weddings and funerals or memorials, one would presumably refer to them as white flags for the former, but as cemetery irises for the latter. This is an example, of course, of how the common names of irises (and many other flowers and plants) are applied differently depending on context and their intended use.

We refer to them as “white irises” because that’s how we experience them visually — yet even these predominantly white flowers can reveal a lot more about irises and their genetic history. Note how those in the first six photos also demonstrate the presence of blue or blue-violet colors in some of the petals and, most obviously, in the unopened buds:

The presence of these blue-violet tones hints at the fact that these white irises have also been genetically engineered to produce light blue variants, something that’s possible because the blue tones are present at the cellular level in irises of this species. Even those that we classify as “pure white” like this one…

… show the potential to produce blue-violet colors: see how, at the throat of the flower just behind the beard, there is a rectangular swatch of the same blue tones that are present in the unopened buds I mentioned above. And further: when I work on these photos in Lightroom and pass Lightroom’s color picker over the standards or falls in photos like this one, Lightroom detects blue and purple throughout the flower petals.

The pixels the camera captures — which represent the accumulated color of thousands of the flower’s individual cells — include these blue-violet tones, almost as if there was a one-to-one relationship between the camera’s pixels and the flower’s cells. What our eyes visualize as white, in the case of these irises (and the color white in nature more generally), reflects how we see these colors and think of them based on color dominance. Yet closer inspection — especially when aided by a precision tool like a digital camera — reveals much more, and helps us see how it came about that the very name Iris was derived from the Greek word for “rainbow” with even white irises as repositories for all the colors in this rainbow. The camera has captured light reflected from many individual plant cells, and when it detects blue tones in apparently white areas, it’s recording the cumulative effect of pigments distributed across thousands of cellular structures.

As with other posts in this series, I photographed these irises in two locations at Oakland. The first six were from older or more historical sections of the property; the rest were among the newer plantings, arranged in clusters in an open acreage of irises. This location separation illustrates different ways in which irises have been used and developed over time, reflecting technological developments in the genetic and botanical history of these irises. The cream irises are directly connected to nearby memorials, whereas the pure white ones were planted to establish formal, contemplative displays. The white ones, by contrast, are a later genetic development, where most (but not all) of the color-producing pigments have been reduced significantly, so that the irises reflect their more pure white characteristics to our eyes, an effect that is emphasized by planting them in clusters producing multiple blooms instead of the more solitary plantings of the older irises.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “The Fascinating Plicatas” in Garden Irises, Edited by L. F. Randolph:

“Of all the color groups in the tall bearded irises, one of the most fascinating is the plicata pattern. These are the irises with a light ground color, usually white, cream, or pale yellow, that is stippled, dotted, or edged with varying amounts of a darker color. Some of the most beautiful varieties are to be found among the plicatas, and some of the best specimens of perfectly branched stalks. Conversely, many of the plicatas have blossoms that lack substance, and while they are exquisite early in the morning, they are often semi-collapsed later in the day after they have been exposed to the full heat of the sun.

“Plicatas never fail to attract the gardening public and to intrigue the iris novice. Among iris fanciers they have fluctuated in popularity over the years and have never quite enjoyed the favor of some of the other color groups. This can be attributed partly to the fact that most of them lack the carrying power of solid colors and must be viewed at close range to be appreciated fully.”

From “Tall Bearded Irises: The Late Twentieth Century” in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“The 1960s and 1970s saw an increase in the size of Tall Bearded iris flowers, but no great advances in quality were made until the 1980s and 1990s. Among the most influential iris hybridizers in this new generation are Barry Blyth of Melbourne, Australia, and Keith Keppel of Salem, Oregon, who have been raising seedlings for 50 years. Their work and that of Joe Ghio in Santa Cruz, California, has increased the choice of flower shape, height, and colours available.

“Blyth and Keppel regularly visit each other and exchange both ideas and pollen. Blyth has registered more than 800 hybrids with the American Iris Society, including Tall Bearded irises and many median irises. His plants tend to be unconventional. Many are heavily ruffled and unusual in colours with extraordinary patterning. Keppel, working first in California, became known for his plicata irises….

“Over the years California has been home to many famous hybridizers, such as William Mohr, who worked around the beginning of the century, and Sydney Mitchell, who continued Mohr’s work. Around 1940 Jim Gibson started to hybridize for plicata-style Tall Bearded irises….”

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Hello!

This is the fifth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10).

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Because of the enormous variety of iris shapes and colors, iris enthusiasts often describe them from different dimensions. Bearded irises, for example, are distinguished from beardless irises; their overall form and height may place them in categories like miniature, intermediate, or tall, whether they have beards or not; and their dominant colors may be used to describe them as white, yellow, purple, or orange, regardless of the presence of beards and regardless of their height.

“Plicata” — similarly — is an iris color designation; or, more accurately, a designation derived from the color patterns present on the standards and falls. That may seem confusing, but when you see examples like the ones I’ve included in the post, suddenly it’s quite clear that these irises exhibit the plicata pattern described in the first quote above: “irises with a light ground color, usually white, cream, or pale yellow, that is stippled, dotted, or edged with varying amounts of a darker color.” Unlike all the other irises in my series — where one color obviously dominates or the flowers contain a multitude of related colors — these irises exhibit the plicata color pattern just defined.

The photos below show two different developments in plicata patterning. The first seven — where a pattern of saturated purple swatches and dots is distributed heavily throughout the petals of both the standards and falls — represent an earlier period in the genetic history of irises, where breeders sought to produce irises that captured visual attention with sharp contrasts between bright colors. The remaining photos are a later development, where the plicata colors are more subtle, with softer transitions among the colors between the iris standards and what resembles watercolor brushing of shades of purple and blue throughout the falls. The standards — which our eyes register as white — actually contain flecks of very light blue and purple, more concentrated toward the base of each upright petal and gradually fading to white toward the edges. Even the beard colors show this carefully managed color transition: instead of a clear distinction between the beards and petals like in the first seven photos, these photos show a gradual distribution of yellow/orange color from the beard itself to the rest of the flower. I took the closeup photos toward the end of the galleries to make all these color transitions more visible; select one of them to view in a full-screen slideshow to better see what I mean.

One way to think about technological developments that enabled iris breeders to produce these elegant colors is by making an analogy to developments in digital photography, both developments occurring in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Consider a digital or mobile device camera that you might have had two decades ago: like any camera today, that device had certain capabilities that all cameras have, like the ability to focus on a subject and accurately capture an image in its storage. But the number of colors that cameras can capture has expanded significantly, which means that more recent cameras can render subtle variations among colors that their predecessors could not. Similarly, iris breeders learned how to genetically create new color combinations and manipulate their presence in iris flower petals with greater precision, enabling these irises to demonstrate delicate arrangements of colors that had previously not been possible. Luckily, our cameras — with their ability to capture more colors — can detect these precise color transitions and reproduce them accurately in photographs.

In the quotation at the top of this post, the author notes that “many of the plicatas have blossoms that lack substance, and while they are exquisite early in the morning, they are often semi-collapsed later in the day after they have been exposed to the full heat of the sun.” This difference is observable in my photographs, where the later photos show the “lack of substance” the quote describes. Especially in the standards, you can see through some of the petals. That translucence — combined with their near-white color — meant that these flowers photographed best in shady or overcast lighting, since they would reflect too much light (leading to a loss of delicate detail) into the camera’s sensor when the sun was out. The irises in the first seven photos, however, have thicker, opaque petals — so very little light passes through them, is instead reflected back to the camera, and they photograph well in both sunlight or shade.

The placement of the two kinds of irises I photographed mirrors their botanical and genetic history. Those first seven are all located in an older section of Oakland, where their presence is somewhat independent of memorial elements nearby. The remaining irises were added to the property more recently, where they were planted in conjunction with new concrete structures — some of which are visible in the photos — including headstones, urns, and rectangular markers. Planting irises so close to these structures reveals itself as an intentional design choice: the gray stone contrasts smoothly with the muted but bright colors of the irises, and the texture of the iris flowers and their leaves softens the appearance of the stark intersecting lines of the stone. This kind of placement represents ongoing developments in memorial gardens, where colors, contrasts, and textures are combined to assemble a space for both quiet contemplation and the preservation of memory.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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