"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: irises

Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (4 of 4)

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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!

Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (3 of 4)

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From “Belamcanda” in Perennial Gardening by Michael Ruggiero: 

“Both species in this genus (also called leopard flowers) are native to China and Japan. B. chinensis is becoming popular in this country as an ornamental, for its shiny blackberrylike fruits as much as for its orange-spotted flowers; once finished, the flowers twist up tightly….

“B. flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ is a wonderful smaller (10-inch) cultivar with the typical blackberrylike fruit….

“Both are fairly easy to grow and are unusual additions to summer and early fall flower borders. Group several plants together to get a telling display. Blackberry lily grows best in full sun positions, in well-drained, reasonably fertile soil…. Planting may be done in spring or fall, but newly planted stock should be protected with a winter mulch. Propagation is most satisfactory by seed sown in spring, either out of doors or indoors at about 70-80° F. Germination will take 2-4 weeks….

“Some gardeners prefer to divide the rhizomes in spring or early summer. Iris borer may attack the rhizomes with devastating effect; dig and destroy as soon as damage is seen; do not compost the foliage to prevent overwintering of borers. Leaf scorch causes an unsightly browning of the irislike leaves. Do not deadhead, or the attractive black glossy fruits will not form. Self-seeding is not a problem.”

From “Lodestone” in Of This World: New and Selected Poems 1966-2006 by Joseph Stroud:

I lie in a hammock in the slow hours
of a summer day, summer at last
in the high country, summer in the air,
in the light, in the poems I’m reading,
poems like deep jade pools of snowmelt
under a summer sun, poems like
whorls of agate. There’s a drift of pollen
through the forest, sifting through
the pines and cedars, a fine gold powder
drifting like the crushed ash of sunlight.
In the seep on the hillside the first
rein orchids appear, the night-blue larkspur,
leopard lilies….

Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos of Iris domestica, where we’ll spend some time looking at one of its cultivars, whose appearance and growth patterns are quite different from the plants I shared in the first two posts, Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4) and Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (2 of 4).

Since the origins of this cultivar’s name — Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’ — are hard to pin down, we can just enjoy the fact that the plant was given this happy little moniker. The excerpt I included at the top of this post — from the book Perennial Gardening by Michael Ruggiero, published in 1994 — refers to Leopard Lilies by their earlier name Belamcanda, calling the yellow cultivar Belamcanda flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ and calling the more frequently planted orange cultivar Belamcanda chinensis. So we know that ‘Hello Yellow’ has been around for at least thirty years, before the two plants were subsequently determined to be variants of the same species and their names were changed to Iris domestica and Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’. The original Belamcanda names actually strike me as more precise than the newer ones — since Iris domestica could now be used to include both cultivars — but these things sometimes happen when plant names change over the years. Belamcanda flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ even captures more of the yellow cultivar’s physical characteristics by not only including the color of the flowers, but also including its fan-shaped leaves — that’s what “flabellata” means — whose distinctive appearance you can observe in the first five photos in the galleries below.

In my first post in this series, I mentioned that Hello Yellow appeared to have been bred to eliminate the spots that had given rise to the plant’s “Leopard Lily” common name, a name that crossed the boundaries between plant life and animal life. Since then, I got to puzzling about that — as one does — which led me to wonder if there were cat-leopards that originally had spots but those spots had disappeared over generations and time. Researching that led me to this interesting article The Black Leopard Has Secret Spots, which describes how the ancestral remnants of spots on this cat’s sleek black coat can be revealed by photography, especially infrared photography.

If you look at the lead photo in that article, however, you can see that it doesn’t actually require infrared photography to reveal the hidden spots. Instead, the right lighting conditions — in that case, sunlight filtered through surrounding trees and shrubs — achieve a similar effect. With that in mind, I knew that I took some of my Hello Yellow photographs when the sun was behind clouds, which would have resulted in lighting a lot like that of the leopard photograph. Here, for example, is one of those photos…

… where you can find Hello Yellow’s spots if you look closely. Follow the petals of the frontmost flower from their edges to the center, and you’ll encounter what may look like bits of pollen, but these are actually spots whose color has been altered from Iris domestica’s original deep purple or black to a shade of yellow-orange that’s slightly darker than the rest of the petals. These color variations are only evident in filtered sunlight like this; you won’t see them in the photos that I took when the sun was out.

But there’s more! Here we compare Hello Yellow to the orange spotted cultivar and can see something else. Notice how spots are distributed among the flower petals on the orange blossoms, then take a look at those same sections of the petals on the yellow variant:

You will see, in this comparison, pale yellow circles and circular texture variations among Hello Yellow petals that are distributed in the same patterns as the dark spots on the orange flowers. These, too, are remnants of the plant’s original spotted appearance, where the plant’s colors have been altered through selective breeding to shift the overall petal color from orange to yellow, and simultaneously reduce the dark spots to shades of yellow. So, as it turns out, the common names Leopard Lily or Leopard flower still work for Hello Yellow after all!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (2 of 4)

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From “The Genus Belamcanda” in The Iris by Brian Mathew: 

“It is generally accepted that this interesting genus contains only one species…. The one frequently grown species is B. chinensis, easily recognized by its flower which has six equal reddish-spotted perianth segments, not differentiated into falls and standards as in an Iris. Furthermore, the three styles are slender like those of Crocus sativus, with a terminal stigma, not expanded and petaloid like those of irises in which the stigma is a flap on the underside of each of the three style branches. Apart from this, the habit of growth is similar to some irises….

“In cultivation in Britain Belamcanda presents no problems if given reasonably good soil with plenty of humus in sun or semi-shade. It does not like a very warm dry position and should have plenty of moisture in the growing season. I find that it is completely hardy in Surrey but is not a long-lived plant. It is however easily raised from seed and flowers in two or three years from sowing….

“The inflorescence is widely branched with about three to twelve flowers about 4cm in diameter. These have six equal perianth segments which are a yellowish or orange-red colour mottled with red or blackish-purple spots. They have hardly any perianth tube at all and the pedicels are jointed just below the ovary so that the whole flower quickly falls off from this point if it is not fertilized. The three style branches are slender, not petaloid….

“Unlike irises, the capsules split open and the three locules curl outwards leaving the central axis exposed. The large blackish seeds stay attached for a considerable time before falling, this feature having given rise to the common name of Blackberry Lily. Belamcanda chinensis is a native of Japan, China, eastern Russia in the Ussuri region, Taiwan and northern India. It occurs in sandy meadows near the sea, in moist scrubland and in shady places from sea level to about 2000 metres altitude.”

From “Farm Gate” by Uys Krige in The New Century of South African Poetry, edited by Michael Chapman: 

Blood-red the aloes flank
the winding road.
As if aflame with leaping sparks each fire-lily glows.
But nothing, nothing stirs… only
a breeze that flows
that seems to pause and waver there
the grass-seed grows.

Above, the blue, blue sky;
and far below, the falling stream
drifts through the orchards with
a flash of green.
And no sound breaks the hovering peace
of this still mountain scene….

The gate stands in
a maroola’s shade.
A wholeness in me, harmony
and no bitterness, no hate.
I lift the catch… and in my heart
open a gate.

Hello!

This is the second of four posts with photos of Iris domestica that I took at Oakland Cemetery during the summer and early fall. The first post is Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4), where I describe my annual trips to photograph this plant, detail some of its unique characteristics, and provide a three-part illustration of its lifecycle.

Below I show several more batches of orange-spotted Iris domestica — the variant that honors leopards and their markings by calling them Leopard Lilies or Leopard Flowers (among other common names) — where I have zoomed from wider shots showing the plants’ surroundings to macro photos that reveal the colors and intricate structures of one or two individual blossoms. With close-up photos like these, you could read through the excerpt describing Iris domestica‘s botanical architecture (published in 1990, when it was still called Belamcanda chinensis) at the top of this post, follow the links to Wikipedia definitions for any unfamiliar terms, and easily identify different parts of the plants.

In the first five photos below, you’ll see batches of Iris domestica thriving near some of Oakland’s large Yucca plants, and in front of a field of ferns in the last four photos. Placements like these are not only visually interesting — providing both color and texture contrasts, as well as a sense of depth — but also show how Iris domestica thrives in the company of other plants while being surrounded by their horizontal spread. Iris domestica emerges from the ground on a single stem even among such plants, then splits into separate branches with multiple smaller stems (pedicels) hosting clusters of flowers — or inflorescences — that will all stand tall against their backgrounds as long as the flowers continue blooming.

Thanks for taking a look!

Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4)

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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!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (10 of 10)

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From “Bearded Irises, Act I” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“The earliest varieties of irises grown and appreciated by gardeners in the 16th and 17th centuries were likely wild hybrids between Iris pallida, the source of lavender pigments, and I. variegata, the source of yellow pigments. Early collectors gave them various names, some pawned off onto botanists as species names like I. amoena, I. squalens, and I. neglecta. Each represented a relatively distinct color group, but the variation seen between clones was highly suggestive of their hybrid constitution. These seed-grown bearded irises were variously distributed across European gardens from the mid-17th century on. It wasn’t until the 1820s, when Parisian nurseryman Paul de Bure raised and named hundreds of seedlings, that the movement to popularize bearded irises gained a footing; ‘Buriensis’ (c. 1822) was his first introduction….

“By the 1870s the bearded iris fascination had crossed the English Channel, and early enthusiasts like Peter Barr were leading the production of new varieties in the British Isles. It was in the 1890s that many breeders, churning out dozens of new varieties each year, began to wonder if they’d reached the limit of the bearded iris’s potential. One of these was Sir Michael Foster, a professor of physiology at Cambridge and by all accounts among the most esteemed iris connoisseurs of his day. Foster grew and experimented with all irises, including oncocyclus irises from the Mideast and spurias….

“The American interest in bearded irises originated with diploids. Bertrand Farr, a music shop owner from Pennsylvania, imported Peter Barr’s entire collection (over 100 cultivars) and established a nursery near Wyomissing in the early 1900s….

“As America was catching the initial round of bearded iris fever, a schoolmaster from Godalming, U.K., was feverishly making crosses of his own. William Rickatson Dykes is the undisputed godfather of the genus, a position he earned partly through his association with Sir Michael Foster, a friendship begun at Cambridge while Dykes was a student there. Upon Foster’s death, Dykes inherited, by way of a mutual friend, copies of his predecessor’s notes and garden records, and like Foster, he bravely ventured into all sorts of deep and muddy waters with his experimental crosses between diploids and tetraploids and dwarf and tall species….

“Dykes traveled extensively to document species in the wild and collect them for horticultural evaluation; in his short breeding career, he introduced 34 cultivars, most in the early 1920s. Dykes died following a car accident in 1925. Two fitting tributes marked the next year: his wife, Katherine, introduced the yellow iris that bears his name, and in June 1926 the British Iris Society created the Dykes Medal honoring the most outstanding variety of the year — an award still coveted by breeders worldwide.”

From “Familiar Landscapes” by Lawrence Raab in The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Robert Pack, Sydney Lea, and Jay Parini: 

Morning’s sudden and extravagant
green seems to suggest the higher
whiter waves of the air, what moves
through the flurry of these
first leaves, floating and falling
beyond everything I am able to see.

Against that brightness, a flock of blue,
a single yellow iris
creaks on its shaft….

How persistently
the eye resists the familiar,
so easily finding itself content
among its accustomed walls,
the expected trees and avenues,
that it fails to see them
and will acknowledge
only what has been changed or lost
or taken away.

Hello!

This is the tenth 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);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (8 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10).

In the ninth post in this series, I introduced a “self iris” whose standards and falls all demonstrated an intense, highly-saturated yellow color. As I described in that post, the ability of that iris to produce colors with such intensity originated in its genetic heritage (enhanced carotenoid production) as well as its growing environment (full day sunlight), which worked together to encourage the iris to produce more and more yellow-colored cells. In this post, we’ll look at some other yellow variations, so I’ve placed two representative samples to the right of the previous yellow self iris below to show their visual differences.

The irises like those in the second and third image above are located in older sections of Oakland Cemetery, neither kind receiving the same level of full-day sunlight as the first one. The partial sunlight they receive varies because they’re all located at boundaries between sun and shade, where nearby shrubs or trees filter out some sunlight at different times during the day. Both kinds get most of their sun exposure during the morning hours — something that irises like these are usually very happy about — with those like the second image spending most of their afternoons in full shade.

At the time I took the photographs — around mid-day — those like the second one were already fully shaded. That actually puzzled me a little, as I didn’t realize there were any irises that could do well with so little light, until I came across this brief note in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“In very hot climates, bearded irises will flower in shade. In Britain, the only bearded iris that managed to bloom in my garden in semi-shade was Iris flavescens, an old soft lemon variety.”

Though I couldn’t confirm it, I’d already concluded from my research on yellow irises that there was a good chance the shaded varieties were genetically related to Iris flavescens or its ancestors — because of their visual similarity to the yellows produced by William Rickatson Dykes and subsequent breeders. That such cultivars have been adapted to partial shade adds a bit of confirmation to that conclusion, especially since these shade-tolerant irises demonstrate another feature that enables them to adapt to lower levels of sunlight. Their falls — as you can see in the second image — don’t droop downward like the falls in the first and third images. Instead, they open to a horizontal or slightly upturned position and stay there while the flowers are in bloom. This enables them to capture additional sunlight (compared to the droopy falls), take advantage of fewer hours of sun shining on their petals, and still keep their photosynthesis humming along. Their ability to do so well with limited sunlight makes them ideal for their placement among the old memorial structures and stonework in the historical sections of the cemetery — where their heirloom quality fits perfectly with the garden design.

The final thirteen images below show different views of the blooms on a single iris plant, a very stately one positioned at the intersection of two walking paths in front of terraced walls, where it beckoned me to photograph it as well as its white and purple relatives in the background. This iris captures light midway between the well-sunned yellow self irises and the mostly-shaded heirloom irises, something that can be seen in its color production. The yellow saturation falls about midway between the other two cultivars; and its position in partial sun means that it doesn’t have to flood its petals with protective yellow carotenoids. It can, instead, retain and display one of its most significant features: carefully placed swatches of yellow near the throat of the falls, and similarly colored yellow striping edging those petals around an oval-shaped white foreground.

My camera, as it turns out, was somewhat mystified by this iris, and produced a RAW image that was mostly yellow — or at least appeared that way because there was enough yellow to create a color cast over the entire image. We end up with this color cast because there’s enough light (despite a cloudy sky) to over-saturate yellow and the color yellow fills so much of the frame in this close-up view.

A simple white balance adjustment — which removes yellow tint — gets us part way there; or, at least, starts to hint at the contrasting color combinations that are present in the falls. Now we can see that there’s pure white that was hidden by the camera’s interpretation.

This improved view of the colors in this iris’s falls influenced the adjustments I made next: I changed the color relationships to create greater separation between the flower’s yellow tones and its whites, then added some texture. The texture addition finishes the job, sharpening the contrast between yellow and white, and enhancing the fine vertical lines that run down the falls. Here are the three step changes showing the transition from the camera’s original interpretation, to the white balance adjustment, to the final version of this image.

Making these adjustments produces a cleaner and brighter image, but it also does something more important than that. It shows a flower that reflects the intentions of its breeders, who altered its genetics to produce the yellow and white contrasts, and the yellow edging, in the falls. The placement of this yellow edging reveals those intentions, because — as you can see in the final photograph — it’s so precise that it looks like it was drawn there, and appears not only on the tops of individual petals but is reflected or mirrored in the colors underneath the petals. Coloration like this is not likely an accident of nature for irises with decades of breeding history, so their photos should acknowledge the technological and scientific efforts, and examine that in the context of their use in formal or memorial gardens like those of Oakland Cemetery.

With that, we’ve come to the end of this project. Through ten posts, about 300 photographs, and around 10,000 words, we’ve done much more than just looked at pretty pictures of fine irises. We’ve traversed topics like how irises are classified scientifically and into color or pattern categories; how their appearance reveals their genetic history and breeding; and how they adapt to their environment by producing different colors and forms. We’ve positioned them across multiple cultural dimensions and explored how they fit into memorial or botanical gardens; how their presence relates to garden design; how photography, art, and poetry can help us see them better and learn more about them; and how they’ve been observed throughout history as symbols of life’s bounty, beauty, and endless complexity.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10)

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From “Yellow” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“I think we take yellow for granted in the iris world, despite the fact that clarifying it from sodden and sullied to lustrous and sparkling was one of the greatest challenges of iris breeding in the 20th century. Many have credited the venerable ‘W. R. Dykes’ (Dykes-Orpington 1926), the iris named for the godfather of the genus, with starting it all — stirring frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic for sun-kissed tints on iris flowers.

“The range of yellow could cover continents in geographical terms. From the palest butter and white blend like that of ‘Melted Butter’ (Fan 1994) to the eye-searing, dark cadmium yellow blossoms of ‘Throb’ (Weiler 1991), yellow unspecifically describes many colors.

“But for much of the iris’s existence, yellow was a rare color, save the few golden or dirty yellow examples of Iris variegata or I. pumila. The earliest yellow, and at that a pale naphthalene yellow, was probably ‘Flavescens’ (De Candolle 1813), an old-fashioned diploid still found along highways and around old homesteads. It seems that generations of gardeners have passed this variety around, or it’s seeded with vengeance beyond the confines of its planting space. Either way, it’s still a simple charmer worth having in stock should an ugly fence or shed need some herbaceous company.

“But early diploids like ‘Flavescens’ were limited in their ability to transcend their own murkiness and fulfill a breeder’s quest for shiny, lustrous yellow. The conversion of diploids to tetraploids made this jump effortless. The originator of the most important yellow of the 20th century, W. R. Dykes, earned the honor of having a clear yellow tetraploid seedling of his named posthumously after him. Though the parentage remains unknown and subject to speculation, there’s no arguing that almost every yellow tall bearded iris and many median irises trace back definitively to ‘W. R. Dykes’.”

From “Irises” in Black Ash, Orange Fire: Collected Poems 1959-1985 by William Witherup:

Opened the kitchen curtain
for light
and was shaken awake
by your purple and yellow irises —
swollen and dripping color
on the morning canvas.

Iris, messenger from the gods
and goddess of the rainbow.
Beauty, dressed in her classic
and romantic robes,
or just pure flower, nameless….

This morning I pulled
the curtain on your garden
and a rainbow
arced into my coffee cup.

Hello!

This is the ninth 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);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (8 of 10).

It seems we took a little break after the eighth post in this series! It wasn’t really a planned break, but starting in the last week of June, we had the longest stretch of rain- and thunderstorm-free days that we’ve seen all spring. After April, May, and most of June made me feel like I’d put down roots in a rainforest, I finally got some consecutive dry days to work in my yard, clean up storm debris, discard plants that drowned in their pots, pull up weeds, and add a few plants for 2025 — including a couple of new daylilies (one called Cosmopolitan and one called Beyond Riches); two different kinds of canna lilies (one called Red Golden Flame and a pair called Bronze Scarlet); and some dark red Dipladenia, the shrubby cousin of the Mandevilla vine. Since my planting season got off to such a late start, I chose plants I know are good at handling the July through September Georgia heat. I’m sure I’ll photograph them all as they take root and start blooming, probably later this month or in early August. But for now, let’s get back to our Iridaceae….

The irises in this post and the next one will include several variations that show off many shades of yellow. As Kelly Norris suggests in the quotation at the top of this post, we may think of yellow irises as very common, perhaps ranking next to purple as one of the most common iris colors. Yet as we’ll explore in these last two posts: the yellow irises we see today have a complex natural and genetic history, where they’ve evolved from the pale yellows of their wild ancestors or early garden inhabitants to the richly colored and textured irises produced by modern breeders.

In one of my previous posts, I introduced a botanical drawing by 17th-century German artist Hans Simon Holtzbecker, who also created this drawing showing a purple and yellow pair side-by-side:

That Holtzbecker chose to pair these colors could be coincidental, or it could reflect his observation of purple and yellow irises found together in the European gardens he studied for his drawings. The right side of the drawing captures his interpretation of yellow shades that would have been prevalent among irises 400 years ago, showing the pale, dirty, or slightly golden tones Norris describes at the top of this post. Botanical drawings like this served a function that would later be provided by photography: documenting the forms and colors in the natural world, where artists like Holtzbecker produced accurate representations of the shapes and shades of specimens they studied.

When you look at Holtzbecker’s drawing, you’ll see where elements of the yellow iris that would receive less light — the throat of the flower, the bases of individual petals, or where the petals are curved — appear darker as the colors seem to shift from yellow toward orange. This is also true among my photographs, like this one…

… where Lightroom detects orange only in the flower’s beards, or in the most shaded sections behind each beard toward the center of the flower. The rest of the flower reads as yellow, whose tones we interpret differently based on the amount of light reflected by the petals. Had I photographed this flower in full sunlight, those subtle yellow tonal variations would not have been as evident. Light filtered through clouds not only reduces the amount of yellow coming from the sun itself, but also lets us see more of the color variations present in the flower. And yet: even filtered through the clouds, the saturated yellow in these irises was substantial enough to splash a yellow color cast across the entire image that was, thankfully, easy to correct by adjusting white balance.

I split my photographs of yellow irises between this post and the next one based on their location in the gardens. This post shows newer plantings that normally get full sun; the next one will include yellow irises from older sections where they receive partial sunlight at the edges of plantings like shrubs and trees, and are positioned among memorial structures placed in the cemetery decades ago. These location differences will help us see how environmental conditions affect an iris’s color, and connect us to the botanical history of and the chemistry behind an iris’s production of color.

The color consistency in these irises places them in the color category called “self irises” — where all the petals of both the standards and falls show one solid color. That consistency is evident even in the partially opened flowers (as shown in the first twelve gallery images below), and is different from the buds of irises like Iris pallida ‘variegata’ where — as I show in my fourth post in this series — the emerging flowers present the color variations they’ll contain at maturity. The intensity and saturation of yellow in these irises, however, tells us a lot about how they might have evolved from their paler ancestors.

The appearance of yellow in these irises is determined by their carotenoid production, the term “carotenoid” referring to the yellow, orange, and red pigments present in biological entities including flowers, fruits and vegetables, and happy creatures like canaries and flamingos. For our irises, though, carotenoids (think of the color of carrots as an easy memory trick) serve more than one purpose: they produce the yellow colors we find so appealing, they help the plant absorb sunlight for photosynthesis, and they protect the flower and the plant from getting sunburned by that same light.

Imagine, for a moment, that you spent your days standing in a rectangular garden at Oakland Cemetery, where you faced the sun all day long and had no access to any shade. You’d need epic amounts of sunscreen to keep from getting burnt to a crisp — something these yellow irises face during their entire blooming season. The irises, however, have their own coping mechanism: the intensity of the sunlight across their dense, compact cellular structure encourages them to produce more and more carotenoids in response, each increase in carotenoids providing an additional layer of protection while simultaneously ratcheting up the level of saturated yellow color we see in the blooming flowers.

The ability of our irises to do that is not accidental, and it’s unlikely that yellow irises like those Holtzbecker illustrated would have been able to survive or even tolerate intense, all-day sunlight. Irises of such saturated and protective yellow are distinctly modern: their development occurred in the twentieth century, enabled (as Norris states above) by “the conversion of diploids to tetraploids” — a chemically complex discovery through which geneticists doubled the amount of genetic material available in developing irises, enabling the creation of irises with greater color saturation and vigor. Newer cultivars like Throb from the early 1990s — an iris that’s very close in color saturation, appearance, and form to those I photographed — clearly demonstrate the results of these revolutionary efforts (originated by William Rickatson Dykes) to produce irises that were even more sun-tolerant than their predecessors.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!