Gardening
Flowerdeluce
Denis Wood
In June, when the days are still lengthening, before the summer settles itself into its longuers of roses, phlox and delphiniums, the most beautiful flowers in the garden are what are prosaically known as tall bearded irises, I. germanica. It was' once not unusual to find separate iris gardens shut away, where one would go to see the peculiar quality of the colours in their flowers, white, violet, blue, lilac, pink, apricot, yellow, orange, copper and almost black. There are fine, clear yellows. Buttermere and Limelight, and a curious Sable Night, de Jager (Sable Knight, Kelway) almost black, and for those who admire them, the deepening yellows and coppers.
It is the blues and the whites which attract me most. If I had the space I would have a garden planted almost entirely with Jane Phillips the best of them all, Blue Rhythm, Galilee, Symphony, Eleanor's Pride, Harbor Blue, and Derwent Water, the latter a pale, washed-out colour in which the blue seems to have run into the white. Running through the blues I would have two whites, the tall White City, and Cliffs of Dover. There is a hybrid group of these irises known as plicate, with standards (the upright petals) and falls (the lower petals) white or whitish except for a veining of colour at the edges. Of these, in Rosy Veil the prevailing grey-white is, as de
Jager so aptly describe it, "stitched with heliotrope," and another which I noticed in trials at the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley two years ago, is Snow Tracery, the standards having marginal stitch ings of pale violet-blue.
Orris root powder is derived from the Florentine Iris, I. florentina, which is thought to have been the model for the French fleur de lis, not for its colour but for its heraldic sculptured outline. It is essentially white but with pale blue zones and has been described as an albino Iris gerrnanica. This is far removed from the gold lilies on a blue ground worn by Louis VIII at his consecration. This gold may have come from the yellow flag of streams and rivers, Iris pseudacorus. Both of these are in Hillier's catalogue.
The best and most neglected of all of them is Iris pallida dalmatica, unobtainable as far as I could find from usual nursery sources until quite lately when it appears in the catalogue of The Plantsmen of Buckshaw Gardens, Holwell, Sherborne, Dorset. E. A. Bowles in his My Garden in Summer of 1914 (just reprinted by David and Charles) writes of this plant as the " most glorious of all irises when it does well . . . it has the widest blue leaf of all my flags and is wonderfully distinct and effective even when out of bloom ... the
flowers a pale bluish lilac . . like a delicious plover's egg just shelled and ready to eat . . ." We no longer call them flowerdeluce, but the Greek Iris, the rainbow goddess, the messenger of the gods, is no bad alternative.
Previous page
