From “The Flowery Land” in Gifts from the Gardens of China by Jane Kilpatrick:
“It was during the peace and prosperity of the Tang period (AD 618-907) that the Chinese people first really had the security and leisure to devote themselves to gardens and to the cultivation of an expanding range of ornamental plants. In addition to the peach and the apricot, several other flowering trees became popular, although this was probably as much due to their mythological attributes and practical uses, as to their flowers and handsome shapes….
“Shrubs seem to have been uncommon in gardens before the seventh century, although Weigela florida was sometimes used as a hedge plant, but references to the beauty and flowering season of magnolias, daphnes and hibiscus indicate that these very attractive plants were being brought into cultivation by this time. Herbaceous peonies (Paeonia lactiflora) were already favourite ornamentals, as were annuals such as the Chinese Pink and the Chinese Aster (Dianthus chinensis and Callistephus chinensis); but many plants grown as ornamentals today, such as the Tiger Lily (Lilium lancifolium), the Leopard or Blackberry Lily (Belamcanda chinensis) and daylilies, were still principally grown for their medicinal rather than their decorative qualities.”
From “The Story of the Fire Lily” in Someone Cares: The Collected Poems of Helen Steiner Rice by Helen Steiner Rice:
The crackling flames rise skyward
as the waving grass is burned,
But from the fire on the veld
a great truth can be learned…
For the green and living hillside
becomes a funeral pyre
As all the grass across the veld
is swallowed by the fire…
What yesterday was living,
today is dead and still,
But soon a breathless miracle
takes place upon the hill…
For, from the blackened ruins
there arises life anew
And scarlet lilies lift their heads
where once the veld grass grew
And so again the mystery
of life and death is wrought,
And man can find assurance
in this soul-inspiring thought,
That from a bed of ashes
the fire lilies grew….
Hello!
This is the fourth of four posts with photos of Iris domestica, and the second post with photos of Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’. The previous posts are Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4), Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (2 of 4), and Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (3 of 4).
I took the photos in the galleries below at Oakland Cemetery on June 21 and July 17, so they show the plant’s transition from its primary blooming period to the second phase where it produces seed capsules. You can see this transition about halfway through the galleries, starting with the photographs of the capsules, which show how this cultivar maintains quite a few flowers even as it starts generating seeds. When I went back in October to photograph the blackberries Iris domestica typically produces that I showed in the first post, however, only the orange-spotted variety had blackberries; those of Hello Yellow had already been dispersed. Together these characteristics suggest that Hello Yellow may have a more condensed reproductive cycle — moving from flower to capsule, blackberry development, and seed dispersal over a shorter time frame — but that could also reflect different environmental conditions, or simply that Hello Yellow was new to Oakland this year and may still be establishing its own rhythms.
The two varieties’ overall growth pattern is also quite different. The first two photos below show a typical group of orange-spotted Iris domestica, which produces fewer plants in any given location that tend to be spread up to a foot apart. This more solitary arrangement may indicate that the plant has evolved to disperse over wider areas — something that’s closer to its wild or native origins — which I observe by finding these orange flowers scattered throughout Oakland. Hello Yellow, on the other hand — as shown in the second two photos — has been bred to produce plants that grow in compact masses: the number of flowers and leaves in any square foot of the garden leaves little space between them as each plant produces crowded clusters of flowers. While both plants will present opened and unopened flowers while they’re blooming, these photos illustrate how differently they’re arranged, from a handful of flowers on each orange Iris domestica stem to Hello Yellow having so many flowers per stem that it’s hard to count them individually.
Because of these distinct growth patterns, the orange Iris domestica appear throughout Oakland as transitional plants marking the boundaries of roadways and blending among other plants, where their bright orange flowers draw your eye toward them and their immediate surroundings. But as we can see from this photo, Hello Yellow, by contrast, produces densely packed leaves topped with bright yellow flowers that are visible from a long distance, making them integral components of a memorial scene:
These Hello Yellow cultivars are growing in one of the many raised sections of the cemetery, about three feet above the roadways that surround it (a very handy position for photographers), and constrained on all sides by a stone wall. When you face that particular plot, you first see the low, soft textures and colors of Lamb’s Ear, which allow shorter memorial markers to remain visible even as Hello Yellow consumes more territory but doesn’t displace the smaller plants. Hello Yellows grow abundantly behind the Lamb’s Ear bunches, where they come close to matching the height of taller gravestones, as well as those in the background, but don’t detract from them visually.
Arrangements like these are not accidental: it’s apparent from their visual characteristics that Oakland’s landscape designers chose these plants intentionally, to provide different visual layers to the scene as time passes and to blend these plants with the immovable parts of their surroundings — like the memorial stones and even the remains of an old tree trunk whose dark colors provide additional contrast for the scene. Given its origins in seventh-century China (as explained in the excerpt from Gifts from the Gardens of China above), Iris domestica (in all its forms) seems especially appropriate for historical garden settings like this, but we’ll have to wait until next year to see if Hello Yellow takes after its orange relative and ventures beyond its present borders.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
