OT-HUMOR: LEAF HOLES


>a huge grouping of iris clumps with tall leaves, dark green with purple
>spreading up them from the top of the rz about 2" high, healthy rzs
>properly above the ground, and big round holes in the centers of the
>leaves with no edge chewing.

;-> ;-> ;-> ;-> ;-> ;->

Congratulations, Rima! You have stumbled across the very rare species iris,
I. fromage suisse. Don't bother looking it up in your Dykes. It is so rare,
even that great catolog keeper never stumbled across a sprig.

The purple tint you note spreading up the base of the fan is characteristic
of I. fromage suisse but is not in itself the telling characteristic. Many
irises have purple based foliage, because, once upon a time, irises were
completely purple, head to toe. Hard to believe, isn't it? Many people have
never heard of this but, as you know, general ignorance of any given report
has no bearing upon its veracity. ;->
The flowers were purple, the fans were purple, and the rhizomes were
totally purple. Purple, purple, purple. The only parts of the common iris
in those antique days that was not purple were haft markings, of course.

Many people were disatisfied with these purple irises. So hybridizers were
called in. This was in July of 1257, when the middle class was spreading
across Europe like fire ants, running up credit debt everywhere it went.
Hybridizers had developed a good reputation from their early success in
changing the shapes of pea pods to match the fanciful designs included on
wall papers, and so all of middle class Europe expected great things of the
Iris Remediation Project, as it was dubbed by troubadours. They were not
disappointed.
Hybridizers built a base camp at Orleans and set about broadening the
limited coloration available on the flowers, a goal that proved amazingly
easy to accomplish, because as we know today, purple is made of molecules,
some of which are also genes. It doesn't take a geneticist to know what
wonders can be accomplished by mixing and matching genes! Within no time
there were so many different irises on the market, people started
complaining that there were too many to choose from and they couldn't make
up their minds.

Many of the new colors, especially the dominant oranges, clashed with the
old purple foliage, which was now despised as "natural-looking." So the
ever-resourceful hybridizers undertook the difficult and often tedious
process of greening the fans. Early attempts failed, including the (to us)
laughable method of installing an iris among other plants with strictly
green foliage, so it would "get the idea." The most effective method proved
to be constant stroking. The hybridizer slowly stroked the purple tint
farther and farther down toward the rhizome, or "toe" as it is known to the
scientific community. By this time the average hybridizer was wealthy
enough to hire assistants to stroke the plants for him round the clock, in
shifts. After several dozen generations of constant stroking, irises gave
up trying to push purple dye up to the tips of their fans.
Later the great scientist Hedy Lamaar developed an innovative technique
using rubber bands to cut off the flow of purple tint to the fan tips,
which led to mass layoffs of hybridizer assistants and denied the iris
plants the daily stroking they had learned to enjoy. Even today, decades
after the loss of their fan-stroking assistants, irises cause the tips of
their fans to turn brown and die back in commemoration of their loss.
Purple based foliage, or PBF, remains in some cultivars, evidence of the
stubborn resistence of the original purple irises.

It was stated above that the presence of PBF in itself is not enough to
identify a plant definitively as I. fromage suisse. The holes on the fans
must also be present with the PBF. Green-based foliage plants with holes in
the middles are *not* I. fromage suisse.

Even a passing acquaintance with the great variety of iris species can
expand one's horizons in pleasant ways. Another rare and fragrant species
is the short-lived I. moribundissima, or the famous "self-composting iris."
I have been fortunate to observe a remarkable clump of this in my own yard
and can tell you I will never forget the experience.

As you can tell from the above perhaps overlong explanation, there are many
different levels of irising expertise represented on Iris-L. Appreciation
of some of these levels requires more patience than others. I thank you for
exercising your patience here at mine.

Happy speciesing! ;->

celia
storey@aristotle.net
Little Rock, Arkansas USDA Zone 7b
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