Tag: irises

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.

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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).

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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!

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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.

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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).

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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!

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