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

Tag: irises

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10)

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From The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim:

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine…. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour….

“The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard…. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea….

“Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…. [Flowers] that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”

From “Flower-de-Luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers,
Or solitary mere,
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers
Its waters to the weir!

Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry
Of spindle and of loom,
And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry
And rushing of the flame.

Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance,
Thou dost not toil nor spin,
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence
The meadow and the lin.

The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner,
And round thee throng and run
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor,
The outlaws of the sun.

The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant,
And tilts against the field,
And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent
With steel-blue mail and shield.

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.

Thou art the Muse, who far from crowded cities
Hauntest the sylvan streams,
Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.

O flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river
Linger to kiss thy feet!
O flower of song, bloom on, and make forever
The world more fair and sweet.

Hello!

This is the first of ten posts (yes, that’s right, ten!) featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery in one lengthy visit toward the end of April. As I mentioned in a previous post (see Studying Japanese Quince): we hope you like irises, because we’re going to spend the next five weeks looking at the photographs and exploring them in different contexts, like their colors, their culture and history, their botanical characteristics, and, sometimes, their appearance in literature (like the excerpt from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the top of this post).

There are 323 photos in the whole series, which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time not only post-processing each image, but organizing them in ways that might make sense for further exploration. As I often do, I’ve arranged the photos by their dominant colors, and ended up with these eight groupings to help me streamline processing in Lightroom and give me some anchors for further research. Here are the groupings in the order I’ll be presenting the photos:

  • Purple and Blue: 50 photos
  • Brown and Gold: 42 photos
  • Purple with Variegated Leaves: 19 photos
  • Purple Plicata: 36 photos
  • White: 38 photos
  • White Standards, Purple Falls: 50 photos
  • Pink Standards, Purple Falls: 26 photos
  • Yellow and Orange: 62 photos

How’s it possible to end up with a large collection like this — which you might describe as so many irises in so little time? I’m glad you asked! There have always been plenty of irises to photograph throughout the gardens, but a few years ago, the caretakers expanded their iris collections by several acres (near the Greenhouse Valley section toward the northeast corner of this map), where they constructed a number of new rectangular garden plots featuring just irises, segregated by color as I’ve done here. And that of course means that if you visit the cemetery during peak iris blooming time (late April or early May), you are pleasantly confronted with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual irises, fully flowering in open spaces, just waiting for you to take their pictures. It’s actually a fascinating addition to a Victorian garden cemetery like Oakland, where plantings are typically associated with various memorial structures and memorial plots, to have this separate set of gardens that have been designed as recently planted independent arrangements of flowers, unaffiliated with the garden’s overall historical design.

The day I took all these photographs started out overcast with some bright but filtered sunlight — my favorite conditions for photographing flowers — but as the morning progressed, the clouds came and went repeatedly so I got to experiment with a variety of lighting conditions including filtered sunlight, stark yellow/white light, and both backlighting and side-lighting. While I’ll sometimes abandon a photoshoot when the lighting conditions change like this, I decided to adapt to it and keep on shooting — in part because we had recurring severe thunderstorms of such frequency in April (continuing through almost all of May) that I thought I might not get another chance to photograph the irises without substantial storm damage. So as you progress through these photos, you’ll see some like this one…

… that adapted to getting storm-battered by adjusting the trajectory of the stem horizontally while still retaining enough upright support to top the stem with a nearly perfectly formed flower. Let’s keep that resilience and ability to adapt to the environment in mind as we move forward with explorations of the iris’s historical persistence, its botanical properties, and its cultural and memorial connections.

I chose Longfellow’s poem to accompany this first post because of the way it seamlessly blends these different connections. “Born in purple, born to joy and pleasance” — for example — doesn’t just describe the color of irises like those in my photographs, but also takes us back to the historical association of irises with royalty or aristocracy. Variations in purple or blue colors and the shape of an iris flower gradually emerged to symbolize royal courts or coats of arms through an association with heraldry, often described as fleur-de-lis (or in Longfellow’s rendering “flower-de-luce”). While there’s some overlap where fleur-de-lis may refer to the shapes of irises or to similarly shaped lilies (abstracting the shape of either flower to a drawing yields similar results), the two remain largely interchangeable in the cultural history of both plants (see Fleur-de-lis Origins for more on that) — and Longfellow clearly intended his poem to describe irises, as he did explicitly in the sixth stanza. That he started out by calling the plant a lily, then reverted to calling it an iris further on, reflects these historical connections.

While Longfellow used evocative colors to induce our understanding of iris history, he also used color to help us see irises in their natural environment, weaving his chosen palette throughout verses in the poem. He was sometimes explicit about that (like the “born in purple” phrase we just discussed), but more often he used an approach that we might call “reflective” by describing the iris’s surroundings. Words and phrases like flame, radiance, green yeomen, burnished, sunbeam, steel-blue, golden rod, celestial azure, and sylvan streams all imply colors that Longfellow found surrounding the irises — yet any of them could be equally attributed to the colors of an iris plant itself, especially when considering how many different colored irises there are, and the enormous variety of colors any individual iris can display. Pick any of my photographs below (or in the rest of this series) and you can find most of these colors; cruise the internet for photos of irises and their descriptions, and you’ll encounter similar phrases in those descriptions; wander for a while among iris gardens at a place like Oakland Cemetery — and whether you’re looking at newly planted acres, or older plantings associated with memorials, it will be quite obvious why the name of the iris itself was derived from the Greek word for rainbow.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Domestica Fireworks (2 of 2)

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From “Blackberry Lily/Leopard Lily (Iris Domestica) in The Illustrated Guide to Nature by The National Georgraphic Society:

“The Blackberry Lily spreads wide its distinctly spotted tepals (look-alike petals and sepals) as if to draw attention to its short-lived beauty, as each blossom lasts only one day.

“A native of China, the Blackberry Lily has escaped cultivation to become widely established in North America. Showy flower sprays appear in the midst of fan-shaped clusters of long, narrow, flat, medium-green leaves. Pear-shaped seedpods form in late summer. When ripe, they split to reveal a cluster of shiny blackberry-like seeds, the source of the plant’s common name; the spots, of course, lend another name — Leopard Lily. A species of a different genus also goes by the name Leopard Lily; Lilium pardalinum, native to California, has somewhat similarly spotted tepals that curl. Its range does not overlap with that of Iris domestica.”

From “Belamcanda” in The Gardener’s Guide to Growing Irises by Geoff Stebbings:

“This genus is native to China, Japan and northern India. The plants look like iris, with fans of quite wide leaves. Given a moist, humus-rich soil they will grow outdoors in temperate zones and should survive most winters, but they are not long-lived plants. There is just one species, B. chinensis, which usually grows to 60cm (2ft) when in flower.

“The inner and outer petals are very similar except that the inner ones are slightly smaller, and the flowers open flat, facing upwards. The petals are orange, spotted with red at the base, and are attractive but not showy. This plant is called blackberry lily because the seed pods open to reveal shiny black seeds.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring Iris domestica from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Iris Domestica Fireworks (1 of 2).

Here’s one of the images from the galleries below, where you can see some of the unique features of Iris domestica that add to its photographic charm but also serve important botanical purposes. As the flowers age, the petals fold and twist in on each other, forming a tight spiral that retains much of the color from the underside of each petal. This change may occur within a few hours of blooming, as Iris domestica flowers often open and close within a single day.

Coincidentally, they share this trait with daylilies — and their aging process is another example of flower senescence, as I described in one of my previous posts, Red and Yellow Daylilies. This is a complex chemical and biological process, one that enables the plant to conserve energy and retain water, as the spiraled flowers will consume less energy and require less water. The plant can then redirect that energy and water toward the growth of other flowers and stems.

In the classic iris book The Genus Iris by William Rickatson Dykes, the author describes the process for Iris dichotoma, a closely-related iris that exhibits the same behaviors:

“This Iris probably produces more flowers on each stem than any other Iris. The stem is much branched and even the branches often issue in pairs at the same point. Moreover from each spathe as many as five or even more flowers are produced in succession. Each flower, unfortunately, lasts only a few hours and often only opens in the afternoon… However, such is the profusion of flowers that there are usually four or six to be found open at once on each plant.

“Another peculiarity of this Iris lies in the fact that it does not begin to bloom until about the middle of August and then continues in flower for about three weeks or a month. Each flower as it dies twists up in a curious spiral and often falls off together with the ovary between which and the pedicel there is an articulation.”

Sounds complicated, of course, but here we don’t worry too much about chemical and biological mechanisms we don’t (yet!) fully understand. You can click the links above for definitions of the three key botanical terms, if you like, but the process (somewhat speculatively) amounts to this:

The aging flower twists in a spiral, possibly to help the plant conserve water and energy. The position of the twisted spiral at the top of the seedpods helps protect the pods from insect or weather damage, until the pods themselves begin to dry out and open to reveal black seeds inside (the behavior that led to the common name “Blackberry Lily”). The seeds are then distributed by any of several seed dispersal methods, including gravity, wind, rain, and creatures like birds or passerby people.

All this enables the plant to make new plants — so I can take pictures of them again next year. Plants are both smart AND photogenically cooperative!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Domestica Fireworks (1 of 2)

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From “Perennials for Summer Bloom” in Sunbelt Gardening: Success in Hot-Weather Climates by Tom Peace:

“Blackberry lily (Belamcanda chinensis) is, despite its deceptive common name, actually a member of the iris family. Vigorous, healthy fans of leaves arise from a small rhizome that expands only slowly over time and grows to two feet tall before blooming….

“The valuable foliage is then embellished by open, branched flower stalks rising above the leaves, producing a succession of orange-and-red-spotted, six-petaled blooms. (Hybrids called candy lilies expand the color range to yellow and purples.)

“The effect is like slow-motion fireworks, but the show doesn’t stop there. Swollen seedpods develop through late summer and split open in fall to reveal berrylike clusters of shiny black seeds. These readily germinate the following spring, increasing the size of Belamcanda colonies.”

From “Blackberry Lily” in Lilies and Related Flowers by Brian Mathew, illustrations by Pierre-Joseph Redoute:

“This showy member of the iris family is very closely allied to the true irises and indeed will hybridize with Iris dichotoma to produce a remarkable range of intermediate offspring. Belamcanda chinensis is the only species in the genus. The flower, with its six equal perianth segments and three slender style branches, is in fact quite different in structure from that of an iris, in which the six perianth segment are separated into falls and standards and the style branches are flattened and petal-like. The fruits also are rather distinctive, with capsules opening to reveal large black seeds; hence the name Blackberry Lily used in some countries.

“Like Iris, Belamcanda produces a fan of flat leaves from a small rhizome and in summer sends up a branching flower stem from the centre of the leaf cluster. This stem can reach 2.5 metres in wild specimens, but it is usually much less than this in cultivation. Each flower is of rather short duration, but because there is a succession of them, quite a striking display is produced over a considerable period of time. Although individual plants are usually short-lived, seeds are freely produced and the young plants rapidly reach maturity. Belamcanda is a native of China, Japan, Taiwan and the Himalayan region….

“The root has been used to cure sore throats and fevers and is also recommended as an antidote to poisons, in particular the bite of a cobra.”

Hello!

I had never really thought of these flowers as “slow-motion fireworks” — as they’re described in the first quotation above — but, you know, the description fits. And it fairly well applies to my photos below of Iris domestica from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, where these little delights tend to grow at the very outer edges of tree-shade, so pick up a lot of filtered sunlight or backlighting. The result is that they glow against dark backgrounds, and the camera does a nice job of capturing the flower petal highlights while keeping the colors and shapes of the stems and buds intact.

As is often the case with popular flowers, you can choose a common name for this one from a long list. Leopard Lily, Leopard Flower, or Blackberry Lily are frequently used, but you could also pick Candy Lily, Freckle Face, Butterfly Lily, or Fire Lily; or replace “lily” with “iris” and have a whole new set of names. They all reflect either the color pattern or shape of the flowers, or (for Blackberry Lily) the plant’s habit of producing fat seedpods that turn black late in the season. “Lily” has stuck as part of the plant’s moniker, though — as we all know, don’t we? — it’s actually an iris. Iris domestica is its proper current scientific name; but that’s a recent enough development in botanical history that the previous scientific name — Belamcanda chinensis — hangs around in a lot of botany or gardening books and other sources. I wrote about the name change history last year: see Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3) if you would like to read more about it.

With that previous set of photos, I also wrote about encountering these irises shortly after a long-duration high-wind thunderstorm had passed through the neighborhood, bending many of them to the ground. Some had obviously been broken or uprooted, with the flowers still intact, stems split like cut flowers in a vase. I wondered if they’d return this year, so was glad to find them — even as a less robust crop than I had seen previously. Then again, the presence of fewer flowers gave me a chance to capture singular stems and flowers against their shaded black or dark green backgrounds, so for The Photographer, that worked out nicely.

Thanks for taking a look!