HYB: remember when Spirit World was introduced?

Iris are definitely progressing.  Keith Keppel introduced Spirit World in
1994, and it was stunningly beautiful.... in the photo.  Here in southern
California it was one of the weakest luminatas I have seen; for me it grew 2"
tall fans and rarely bloomed.  Any stalk was stunted.  Nevertheless, that
photo sold a lot of iris.  I crossed it once with Epicenter; nothing ugly but
nothing spectacular.

Now I have a seedling (not using Spirit World at all) where the flower
resembles the pattern on Spirit World, except that that standards are much
lighter than the falls and have a translucent "marble-like" appearance.  The
veining and rim on the falls are just like the SW photo  It also has a more
pronounced white zone around the beard, which also has more white in it.  The
petal edges (particularly on the standards) are attractively serrated.  The
flower has good ruffling and nicely touching/closed standards.  May even be
worth introducing, depending on vigor and bud count.  It just occurs to me
that since 1994 we have seen so many extraordinarily lovely luminatas from
Keppel and Ghio that we have become somewhat jaded, and no longer realize just
how extraordinarily lovely some of them are.

John Reeds
lamegardener@msn.com
southern California zone 9b

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