Baby Blue Iris

What’s blooming in the area: Last apples, Austrian copper, Persian yellow and Dr. Huey roses, Apache plume, rosy-purple flowered shrubs, skunkbush, first oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, nits-and-lice, hoary cress, purple, tumble and tansy mustard, stickseed, loco, oxalis, some type of short lavender phacelia, blue gilia, alfilerillo, perky Sue, goatsbeard, native and common dandelion, June, cheat and three awn grass; buds on hollyhock; Siberian elm has invaded one of the active hay fields.
What’s blooming in my yard: Lilac peaked, forsythia, spirea, Siberian pea, tulips, grape hyacinth, German and Baby Blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, yellow alyssum, flax, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on some roses, snowball, beauty bush, sea pink, and Moonshine yarrow; tamarix, sand cherry and Russian sage leafing; Illinois bundle flower, lilies, butterfly weed and baptista up; pied snapdragon made it through the winder.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum.
Inside: South African aptenia, kalanchoë and zonal geranium; another new snake plant sprouted.
Animal sightings: Snake, rabbit, birds, gecko, bees, dragonfly, small moth, baby grasshopper, harvester and small red ants; quail and hummingbirds are back. Some noisy black bird, smaller than a starling, has staked out the peach this year; hopefully it eats grasshoppers.
Weather: Bare root plants that didn’t go out until after the last frost are in shock because they didn’t have enough time to settle before this week’s afternoon temperatures rose for hours into the low 80's; windy yesterday; last rain 5/03/09; 14:54 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Iris are quintessential passalong plants. They spread through rhizomes that form impenetrable woody brown mats that must be thinned to prevent the plants from choking themselves. Once they go dormant in summer, little can harm them. Gertrude Jekyll used to take a plasterer’s hammer to hers, while a woman I knew in Michigan took some she found in a discard pile that had been exposed for months.
My first Michigan plants were some coffee-colored German iris that came in a shopping bag from a friend who’d bought a home with a neglected garden in rural Metamora. My first iris here were some tall blues I salvaged from my abandoned yard in Abilene, Texas.
A few years later, a man in Los Alamos gave me a grocery bag of root sections he’d thinned for his in-laws in October that he said were Baby Blues. They’re blooming now, about nine inches high and a pale, almost silvery blue with white beards.
Those particular iris are probably the result of more swaps and trades among friends than can be recounted. Michael Foster used to receive rhizomes from American missionaries and others traveling in the middle east which he would add to his iris garden in Cambridge, England, before trying to cross them with other iris, just to see. When friends came to visit, Laetitia Munro says, they usually left with bags filled with his surplus.
Some of his crosses produced spectacular blooms because some of his gifts had mutated into tetraploids with double the usual chromosomes. He called one Amasia for the area in Turkey where it was found; another, Ricardi, was named for its collector in Palestine.
After he died in 1907, Robert Wallace sold some of Foster’s hybrids through his Essex nursery, while William Dykes used his notes to publish The Genus Iris in 1913. By 1920 there were so many tetraploid varieties being offered under so many names, a group of concerned gardeners and nurserymen met in New York to bring order with the American Iris Society.
Despite the publication of their first list of valid names in 1922, people continued to trade their rhizomes and experiments with friends. In the 1930's, two men swapped pollen to overcome problems with crossing species with asynchronous bloom periods. Paul Cook’s Tennessee-grown German irises flowered the same time as the earlier blooming dwarf pumilas were opening for Geddes Douglas in Indiana.
Their lilliputs sparked another flurry of breeding activity as others sought to produce what the AIS renamed standard dwarfs. The flowers remained the size of germanica and the leaves still reached the lower flowers, but the stems shrank to hold two or three closely spaced buds that looked good in mass plantings. Lilliput falls flared out so they and their beards could be seen from above.
My plants are clones of something that was growing in White Rock in 2000, but they are not identical. Some have horizontal petals, some do not. A few have darker blue veins on their falls, while others are more purple. It may be color varies by minute differences in soil and exposure in my yard, or that the early ones differ because temperatures and sun angles are lower, but it also may be that the inherent variability of irises has reappeared after the plants survived outside the standardizing conditions of the horticultural industry.
I’m not sure Baby Blue is a registered name; today it’s used for a cultivar of the Alaskan Iris setosa. It doesn’t really matter: passalong plants almost always acquire folk names. Like Foster I sometimes associate mine with places like Metamora and Abilene, but more often I call them by the memories they evoke of Ruth and Steve and Claude.
Notes:
Austin, Claire. Irises: A Gardener's Encyclopedia, 2005.Hobhouse, Penelope. Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening, 1983, compilation of writings by Jekyll with commentary by Hobhouse, including quotation from page 225.Munro, Laetitia Munro. "Notable Irisarians: Sir Michael Foster," available on-line.
Photograph: Baby Blue iris after last weekend’s rain, with grape hyacinths, reddish sea lavender stems from last summer, and gray Silver King artemisia leaves; one on left has horizontal outer petals, while falls on right are curved; 3 May 2009.