Re: German Irises
- Subject: Re: German Irises
- From: t*@Lanl.GOV (Tom Tadfor Little)
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 96 08:56:58 MST
Rosemary asks
|Hi everyone: Please bear with a novice's question but it was suggested to
|me on the Gardens list that I use German Irises to serve as edging plants
|for rugosas. I'll have to plead ignorance here! WHAT are German Irises?
"German Iris" is one of those traditional terms that doesn't correspond
well to any botanical or horticultural group. What people usually mean
by it is bearded iris, particularly the TBs.
This started long ago because Linnaeus named the common garden iris
of his time Iris germanica. When later botanists worked on the genus,
they did not retain this species name; the consensus was that Linnaeus's
"Iris germanica" was really a hybrid plant (what we would now call an
intermediate). Recently, however, Mathew and others are using the name
again to designate some of the wild bearded irises of Europe.
In the gardening world, however, "German iris" is an incorrect, out-of-date,
and imprecise way of talking about garden varieties of bearded iris.
FWIW
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Tom Tadfor Little tlittle@lanl.gov -or- telp@Rt66.com
technical writer/editor Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Telperion Productions http://www.rt66.com/~telp/
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