From “Iris florentina” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:
“One iris was an important economic commodity in centuries past: Iris florentina. The story of Iris florentina is fascinating and complex. The complexity of the history of Iris florentina stems both from the existence of a widely distributed imposter and from taxonomic reclassification.
“The authority of taxonomists is an awesome power for advancing our knowledge of the physical world. But taxonomists are not immune from errors of fact or judgment. This is exemplified by the history of Iris florentina. The history of Iris florentina is also evidence of the wisdom of the illustrious 15th-century Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti who observed that ‘nothing overshadows truth so much as authority’….
“During the Middle Ages the city of Florence became famous for three products: gold coins, fine silks, and orris root. The Florentines, who seldom missed an economic opportunity, were known to sell the finest quality orris root. It was made from white irises grown on the hillsides of Tuscany. These white irises owed their fame and their name to the city of Florence….
“Linnaeus described and named the white bearded iris in 1759. He gave it the name Iris florentina, which is what herbalists had been calling it for at least two-hundred years.
“Pierre Joseph Redoute painted the first detailed and botanically accurate picture of Iris florentina. Redoute’s painting was reproduced in Les Liliacees, often considered the finest set of botanical prints ever produced, in 1802….”
From “Iridaceae: Iris albicans Lange” in P. J. Redoute Lilies and Related Flowers by Brian Mathew:
“It is unfortunate that the plant illustrated so beautifully by Redoute was not the same plant as the Florentine Iris, from the rhizome of which the perfume and medicinal agent known as orrisroot was obtained. The plate actually depicts an Arabian species, which was later described by J.M.C. Lange as Iris albicans. The true Florentine Iris is the more well known of the two and is also white-flowered, but is almost certainly nothing more than a colour form of the common Iris germanica and not a distinct species….”
From “White Pigeons” by Laura Maner Sams Sanders in The Yearbook of Contemporary Poetry 1936, edited by Margaret Nelson:
Today I saw white pigeons fly
O’er a snowy dogwood tree.
The background was a slaty sky,
With white clouds, foaming mistily.
White, densely foliaged Cherokees
Were blooming on a near-by fence.
Among them supped the honey bees,
Enjoying their fresh fragrance.
White irises on cool green stems
Were gleaming in the shady light.
Each flower held clear, dewy gems.
A symphony in green and white.
O’er this space of white and green
Six pigeons chose to wing their way.
As if to help complete the scene,
And add more beauty to the day.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of white irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. Oakland’s white irises are among the first irises to appear in March or as early as February, continuing to bloom for six to eight weeks, with a few exuberant ones making an appearance well into the summer if their growing conditions permit. The poem I included above describes one of their key visual characteristics — white gleaming even in shady light — and they tend to be visible from great distances because of that glow and their presence on a landscape not yet quite filled with spring color. The poem also highlights the color white’s appearance in other parts of the scene it describes, including the blooms of a Cherokee Rose — a plant I photographed at Oakland around the same time (see Rosa laevigata, the Cherokee Rose (1 of 2)).
I wrote about these white irises last year as part of a series of posts (see Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10)) and identified them there as Iris albicans. While that identification is still not inaccurate (!!), it doesn’t reflect the intricate history of this plant’s names, something that became apparent to me when I tried to follow a link I’d included to a Wikipedia page about Iris albicans. The linked page — originally “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_albicans” — no longer exists, and Wikipedia instead redirects automatically to its Iris florentina page instead.
Now, while it’s true that my approach to this blog has evolved into an informal “take pictures and teach yourself botany” methodology, it struck me as unlikely that I wouldn’t have noticed that an Iris albicans Wikipedia search took me to a plant with a different name entirely. By digging around in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I found a snapshot of the article I’d originally linked to dated October 2025, shown here…
… where you can see a note that says “It has been suggested that this article be merged into Iris florentina” near the top of the page. As good news to this amateur botanist, the snapshot of an October 2025 Iris albicans page meant that when I had previously linked to it — in June 2025 — it did indeed exist on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, this recent and very deliberate name change struck me as an emerging mystery that I needed to dig into.
As I’ve mentioned here many times, I use PlantNet to try to identify plants I photograph at Oakland, then use other resources to support PlantNet’s suggestions. PlantNet anchors its identification intelligence around various floras — roughly, geographic regions aligned with the body of native plants typically found there — so I uploaded four of these white iris photos to see what PlantNet had to say about them, using the Southeastern U.S. Flora (because that’s the region where I photographed the plants).
As you can see from this screenshot, PlantNet only identifies these white irises by their genus name Iris — something that happens mainly because they’re not native flora in my southeastern corner of the United States. This isn’t too unusual, and it’s often true for plants I find specifically at Oakland where — reflecting its Victorian history — the plant residents include a wide variety of non-native species whose ancestors would have been imported in the nineteenth century when gardens and garden cemeteries like this were being established. And in this case, PlantNet provides a useful message explaining that “A similar-looking species has been detected in another flora” with a handy button to click to identify the same images in World Flora encompassing the whole natural world.
Based on what I thought I knew about these irises, I would have expected PlantNet’s World Flora to tell me they were Iris albicans, as I identified them in 2025, but their identity comes up as Iris florentina instead:
So now I have two data points sending me away from Iris albicans toward Iris florentina; or, in the words of Rabbit from Pooh’s Heffalump Movie: “What we have here is a mystery of the most mysterious kind.”
Resolving (or merely understanding) the mystery took me back to the fifteenth century, where — as the first quote at the top of this post explains — the original plant name Iris florentina derives from the connections between the plant’s native presence around Florence and the commercial development of orris root for medicinal use in Italy. The blending of botanical and economic disciplines often lends weight to the cultural significance of plant families and species, and Iris florentina fits that model: the plant became widely studied and appeared in art and literature, such as in the Portinari Altarpiece painting from the 1470s where it carries significant religious symbolism. By the 1800s when botanical artist P. J. Redoute famously attributed a white iris drawing as Iris florentina in the first volume of his Les liliacees series (you can see the drawing here), the name was well entrenched for similar-looking white irises (in part from Redoute’s influence as an illustrator), even as botanists began to suggest other potential names and species differentiations for various observed white irises.
That helps explain why the definitive-sounding cliffhanger at the end of the Mahan excerpt above can be contradicted by the second excerpt from Brian Mathew’s book P. J. Redoute Lilies and Related Flowers, where Mathew stakes a different claim: that Redoute’s Iris florentina is actually a drawing of Iris albicans — Iris albicans being one of several names proposed for these white irises in the decades after Redoute published his Iris florentina drawing. But with discussion over whether these irises should be called Iris florentina, Iris albicans, or grouped with Iris germanica spanning both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mathew’s claim isn’t the last word either — a conclusion we can safely derive from my discovery of the recent Wikipedia article switch-up and unexpected PlantNet results.
Both the Wikipedia article and PlantNet’s floras use Kew’s Plants of the World Online for plant scientific names and plant family relationships (or taxonomies), and Kew now treats the name Iris albicans as a synonym for Iris florentina rather than as a separate species…
… supporting that conclusion with research produced as recently as 2024. So we have, in effect, returned irises of a particular species to their earlier European names and collapsed two species of irises into one — which means that the cultural, botanical, and historical threads of Iris florentina and Iris albicans are now intertwined, something we’ll explore in the next post in this series.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
