From “‘B. Y. Morrison’ and the World’s First Woman Plant Hybridizer” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:
“Grace Sturtevant, the world’s first woman plant hybridizer, was 52 years old when she issued her first iris catalogue in 1917. During the next 30 years she named and introduced more than 200 irises, some of which were among the most widely grown cultivars in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Many of her irises were used by other iris hybridizers in their breeding programs. Rare is the modern tall bearded, border bearded or intermediate bearded iris in our garden today that does not have a genetic heritage from cultivars bred by Grace Sturtevant….
“Grace Sturtevant was born in Boston in 1865…. Her earliest ancestor in America was Samuel Sturtevant who arrived in Plymouth Colony from Kent in 1642. She was the daughter of Dr. E. (Edward) Lewis Sturtevant and his first wife, Mary. Her father was an early advocate of scientific farming in the United States. His research and writings helped shape the course of American agriculture.
“E. Lewis Sturtevant introduced his eldest daughter to classical literature and he taught her botany and science…. It was his influence and instruction that led to her fascination with plant genetics and ultimately to her seminal achievements as a breeder of new garden irises….
“Her main interest in breeding irises was, in her own words, ‘as a study of genetics and of color.’ Grace Sturtevant was the first American iris hybridizer to establish goals, and she carefully chose which irises to use as parents to achieve her goals. She kept detailed and meticulous records of her crosses and her seedlings. She was one of the first to realize that the plicata pattern, which at that time consisted of blue or violet stitching, dotting or feather on a white ground, is a recessive trait….
“Each spring when garden irises burst into bloom in our gardens they are a living rainbow-colored commemorative to the Yankee lady from Wellesley Farms who loved irises.”
From “Invisible Colors” in Original Blend: New and Selected Poems by Richard Alan Bunch:
In the morning light,
the first thing that
comes into focus
is a vase of flowers
on our windowsill.
As you know,
night is a dream we have
and I vaguely remember
my dream of jitterbugging
in unparched fields
near water spills
on white formica
during the yellowing
gleam of lovely
summer days
away from the madness
of the big city
with its hubbub of media.
Those are classic moments
when the mother silence
of invisible colors
penetrates all the way
through unborn life
as nightingales
melodiously sing
on summer eves.
Meanwhile, blue plums
and gold iris
follow dreams of their own.
Hello!
This is the third of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The first post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10); and the second post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10).
Of all the photos I took for this series, the irises I’ve included here display more complex color combinations than any of the others. Many irises contain dominant colors that we identify immediately when we see them — visible as either a single color, or, as often, a lighter shade of the same color in the standards that’s in the falls. We’ll often describe such irises by their single or duotone colors, calling them purple, or blue, or yellow — whichever primary or secondary color fits best. But the irises in this post want to be seen much differently.
Here I show the four color ranges represented in the following galleries. While there is overlap among the colors — especially those of the first three — there are distinctions that work reasonably well when describing them visually, at least to start. The first photo trends toward peach, the second toward pink, the third toward orange, and the final one toward purple, tones you probably now see more clearly since I attached these color names to the flowers.
These irises are most likely variants of Iris x germanica or Iris variegata — whose genetics have been modified to generate a larger number of color variations from their base forms, creating what iris breeders might refer to as either “broken color” or “multicolor” irises. While it’s not possible for me to trace that color generation back to its source, note that the beard colors in yellow/orange shades are typical of many (if not most) irises, and that the colors extending throughout the petals reflect (and elaborate on) those tones that are present in the central structures of the flowers behind and surrounding the beard. This kind of color development in irises was common to iris breeding efforts in the twentieth century, efforts to create visually impressive “show irises” designed to capture our attention by their combinations of flashy colors and their distinction from more commonly colored irises.
While conducting some research on Iris x germanica and Iris variegata, I came across this botanical drawing of an iris that, coincidentally, is identified ambiguously by both names.
The drawing was created by Hans Simon Holtzbecker, a 17th-century German artist known for his floral paintings and drawings. It most closely resembles my fourth sample image above, in part because of the tones Holtzbecker included in the standards — variations of the color brown — and the tones in the falls, variations of purple. As an accurate representation of the colors of this iris, though, Holtzbecker’s image couldn’t have included all the colors as those in my photograph, because irises containing these complex color combinations didn’t exist in the 17th century.
And yet: If I take Holtzbecker’s botanical image, import it into Lightroom, and adjust the saturation and luminance of its red, orange, yellow, and purple color channels, we can observe something about the drawing that isn’t evident in the original. The variations in the color tones become more apparent, and the drawing’s colors now more closely match those of my photograph taken about 400 years later.
Lightroom hasn’t created new colors through my adjustments; it’s just made them more apparent. This suggests that Holtzbecker was aware of the subtle tonal variations present in his subject’s petals and used layering techniques to gradually shift the underlying colors to their final versions. This kind of layering is not entirely unlike how a digital camera today “layers” primary colors to render tonal variations that aren’t necessarily apparent to our eyes, at least without zooming in and making a more detailed analysis.
That Holtzbecker’s drawing actually contains so many color variations that aren’t immediately visible tells us something about how important botanical drawings were for documenting color and form in the natural world. In eras preceding the use of cameras for nature documentation, botanical drawings served that purpose, giving naturalists a way to study plant characteristics of specimens they didn’t have direct access to. Such study accumulated over time into an awareness that flowers like irises contained a multitude of colors that might not reveal themselves during casual observation, but laid the foundation for an understanding of color variations used by twentieth-century botanists — like the pioneering horticulturist Grace Sturtevant, above — to tease out new combinations of colors, as they developed the skills and scientific techniques to do so.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
