Iris ignominy

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            I don?t know about rest of you, but I hate being thought of as ignorant especially on subjects I know very well. But a current practice of the Iris Society makes us all look ignorant in the eyes of the world plant community when we write for the various journals associated with AIS. The fact that this practice is carried out not out of ignorance but out of defiance of the rules and regulations that have been arrived at democratically during International horticultural conventions seems all the more reprehensible. What am I talking about? Well, don?t laugh, but do we really have to print cultivar names in CAPITAL letters. The rest of the world has chosen a convention of ?Title Case? in single quotes. If one comes to the Iris society, or the other two outlaw societies, hosta and daylily, it is quite jarring to see this international standard abused. Of course Hosta and Daylily are made up largely of former Irisarians. The three societies make up a very small portion of the plant world and I fear sometimes are looked upon as rather provincial by other plant people. When the American Iris Society was started it was a leader among plant communities. AIS helped originally establish registration systems and the first set of guidelines. As AIS?s influence spread across the horticultural world we helped initiate the present system which continued to evolve through the years and by the early 60?s has become pretty much an established culture of the horticultural world. But for some reason AIS stopped leading and stopped evolving and now is stuck in an almost 50 year old format. We have a new registrar who will have to create programs to print the Registrations and Introductions. It seems like an ideal time to change formats. You may moan and groan that you don?t want to change because it would take too much work. I will have more work than anyone since SIGNA has the largest checklist and I would have 5,000 entries to change. About 5 times the size of a ?Registrations and Introductions?. But I think it would be good if AIS could move forward on this together. I am curious to hear what everyone thinks, I hope I might initiate a grassroots movement.