From “Blackberry Lilies” in Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:
“There is a speckled Asian irid that offers something of an analog to the American tigridias. The old botanical name for the plant is Pardanthus (‘leopard flower’). In the South these rich orange, purple-spotted blossoms have long been familiar as blackberry lilies, for the round, black seeds that persist clustered like blackberries after the fat pods open. Most garden literature refers to these perennials as Belamcanda chinensis, a Latinized version of their Asian name, balamtandam, and their home country, China. Recently, however, DNA-wielding botanists have assigned this distinctive plant the more pedestrian title Iris domestica.
“This flower was once common in gardens, but is now more often seen as an escape, growing on damp, acid soil. Like many other deserving plants, this easy-growing irid has yielded its place to more obvious blooms. Jefferson had it at Monticello, where he knew the colorful blossoms as Chinese ixia.
“The ephemeral flowers, appearing on slender stems above short fans of matte green foliage, continue over a long summer season. After the pretty flowers fade, the capsules enlarge to form the handsome ‘blackberries,’ which persist over winter and as cut decorations for autumn vases. The fleshy roots develop offsets that may be divided for increase, and the seeds, when sown, often flower the first season.
“In addition to the common purple and orange of the wild Iris domestica, nurseries provide a pale yellow selection, ‘Hello Yellow,’ and several hybrids with the Mongolian I. dichotoma.… Usually sold as pardancandas or candy lilies, they come in a wide range of exotic, warm-colored pastels. All grow readily on damp ground and make showy, but short-lived perennials. They grow easily from seed and mix cheerfully in borders of white phlox, yellow daylilies, or blue mistflowers….”
From “A Poem About Icebergs and Planting” by Susan Ingersoll in The Backyards of Heaven: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry:
let there be
blackberry lilies,
starry mountain bluets…
let the cycle of renewal
rumoured at another season
be complete
now the earth will turn again
toward the light
let the bee balm return, and the bee,
and the honeysuckle
and the sun
these seeds are shiny black
like shot, messages
sent underground to the future,
that august should see…
belamcanda chinensis
in the name of faith in
the name of magic
Hello!
This is the first of four posts with photos of Iris domestica — a plant with many fun common names like Leopard Lily, Leopard Flower, Blackberry Lily, Candy Lily, Freckle Face, Butterfly Lily, and Fire Lily — that I took at Oakland Cemetery during the summer and early fall. I first discovered roving packs of Iris domestica at Oakland in 2022 (see Leopard Flower Variations), returned to photograph them in 2023 (see Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3)), and again returned to photograph them in 2024 (see Iris Domestica Fireworks (1 of 2)).
Across those years, I experimented quite a bit with rendering their colors in different tones, varying white balance to demonstrate how that shifts orange and yellow between warmer and cooler shades, and isolating the flowers on black backgrounds to show off the structure of their petals, stems, and leaves. Each new batch of the plants gave me an opportunity to try new photographic treatments but also to learn more about them, as I uncovered fascinating stories about how they were introduced at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello gardens in the early 1800s; how their scientific name changed from Belamcanda chinensis to Iris domestica just twenty years ago; that they were determined to be members of the Iris family and are not lilies at all; that there are cultivars whose appearance contradicts the common names Leopard Flower and Leopard Lily by having eliminated the dark spots that established the plant’s “leopard” nickname to begin with; and — from the Scott Ogden book excerpt above — that Iris domestica behaves as an escaped plant impervious to human intent to constrain its spatial growth as it ventures out beyond any borders. This last point is evident in how I’ve seen the plants make their way around Oakland, from a couple of defined clusters at the boundaries of several garden pathways that I encountered in 2022, to randomly appear in new locations from one year to the next.
One of its cultivars — Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’ — made its debut at Oakland just this year, appearing in this memorial scene as a crowded mass of flowers whose density increased as the summer went on:
I was out photographing daylilies on the morning I came across these, and almost passed them by because from a distance they looked like yellow daylilies, which I’d already photographed abundantly. Once I realized they were an Iris domestica variant — the flower shape reveals their identity — I spent plenty of my shoot time photographing these from various distances and angles to study their characteristics and observe more about how different they are from the plants that produce spotted orange flowers. Over this post and the next three, then, we’ll look at two sets of photos featuring plants with orange petals and leopard spots, and two sets of photos featuring Hello Yellow, while we explore their botanical similarities and differences in some detail.
June and July are peak bloom times for most Iris domestica variants, and in the past, I’ve shared their photos during the summer — but I held off this year to capture the plant’s full growth and reproductive cycle from buds and blooms, to seed capsule generation, then finally to the production of “blackberries” represented in the “Blackberry Lily” common name.
The first five photos below this paragraph show the orange-spotted variant during its blooming period (I took these photos toward the end of June), where even here you can see some fully opened flowers, some that have not yet opened, and a few whose flowers have twisted into the tight spirals that are one of Iris domestica’s distinctive features. This range of development states is common to many flowering plants and represents a timed blooming that occurs sequentially over several days to present multiple opportunities for visiting pollinators. The flower twisting that Iris domestica produces, though, is quite uncommon, and represents a transitional stage for this plant, where the flower is closed to pollinators because of its reduced visibility. The twisted flower — which is quite stiff to the touch — also serves as a protective mechanism for the seed packet that will grow to eventually push the desiccated flower off the stem.
By the middle of July, the same plants have entered the second stage of their lifecycle, where all of the flowers have been replaced by seed capsules. While not especially photogenic (three photos seemed like enough to show this stage), the capsules are botanically and biologically significant, as their blackberries are growing inside. Some of the capsules are quite large — up to an inch in length — and as fat as a thumb. The third photo emphasizes their size, but also shows a tiny “pin” at the top of each one, from where the twisted flower has completely dropped off. The green capsules continue to grow for several more weeks, through the end of summer and into early fall.
Fast forward to October (I took these photos just last week, on October 6), and now we can see what has happened since the seed capsules have dried up, split open, and gotten discarded: the berries of Blackberry Lily fame appear as clusters at the ends of many stems, somewhat protected by what remains of the capsule and the dried leaves where the flowers once extended from the stems ends. The berries will be picked up by flying seed dispersal agents like birds, or scattered by the wind, or brushed off the plants by humans or other animals passing by — to find their way into the ground and enable the plants to spread into their next seasonal cycle, taken root and germinating wherever environmental conditions are suitable.
Here in the Southeast, the appearance of Iris domestica berries is one of the first indicators that autumn has arrived, even before frosty temperatures kick in and other plants, trees, and shrubs start producing the colors of fall. And for those of us already thinking ahead to the upcoming winter holidays, the contrasting blue-black colors of the berries surrounded by yellow-gold leaves might trigger early thoughts of Christmas decorations, especially Christmas picks and sprays whose designs are often based on the shapes and colors of plants like Blackberry Lilies, and whose cuttings fill our mantles, windows, tables, and vases from November until the new year.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
