<<It's not at all obvious to me that the AIS or its membership are "biased" in favor of the bearded irises. This has been tossed out as though it were a simple fact, when actually I think it is very much a matter of subjective perspective.>>
It certainly was not the case in the beginning, in fact the BAIS from the first ten years feature every sort of Iris species imaginable, and quite heady scientific matter about them. Sturtevant covered the bases so well and engendered such fervor that the complaint was that interest was being drummed up in species that no one could get their hands on. Bulbous things were in particularly short supply due to the Federal quarantine, and some exotica from the near east, all of it wild-collected, became almost impossible to get hold of during WWI and its aftermath.
But the early members of AIS, say up to WWII, did not have much doubt they could grow anything they could get their hands on, and the demand was there among many early AIS members, who tended to be adventurous sorts. John Wister designed a garden for the Simmons mattress family in Connecticut in which there were planted, and I quote from Country Life in America in 1934, "140,000 irises in about seventy-five species and 1,450 named varieties." Forty-six hybridizers were represented. The garden did not long survive the death of the owner, in fact his widow started selling off chunks of land probably before the pogons needed dividing, but that is what was considered the very model of a modern rich man's iris garden at the close of the Jazz Age.
Meanwhile, the AIS PR was working and membership grew rapidly and the number of people daubing grew alongside it until the wail was heard that there were too many irises, and what people had to daub on was pogons. I think we have to appreciate the vast difference in what they were producing in the 1920s compared to what had been available before the War, which was preponderantly archaic diploids. Then, somewhere circa 1930, there appeared in BAIS the observation that the TB was the most popular form of iris among the membership and would likely always be. So, the notion is not a new one.
You get into a chicken and egg loop with the question being whether non-bearded are less popular because there are fewer produced or fewer produced because they are less popular. But the question of what is produced is squarely in the hands of those who are actually doing the producing, so that if folks want more bearded and species hybrids as candidates for awards, the surest means of effecting that change is to get into the game themselves.
<< In my view, the AIS is to be commended for promoting the beardless irises *in spite of* their being considerably less popular with the iris buying public.>>
This is just nonsense, of course. People who hybridize for a living may be obliged to bear the facts of commodification in mind,
but the mission of the Society is to educate, not dance to the tune of the vox populi.
Cordially,
AMW
Richmond, VA USA
