Sorry about the double posting.

I think this one would be very hard to ID. First, the picture is not clear enough to see the details, including the beard, or any haft venation. You would need to take a high quality closeup shot. Second, there are so many iris of this color and general shape that even with a sharp closeup, ID would be difficult. It is definitely not a modern iris, and could be anything from SNOW FLURRY (1938) onwards to iris of the 50's, maybe even 60's.
Laetitia

i completely agree with you, yet i just asked myself... i see about 6-8000 iris a season by visiting all the growers in my area, and then when my area finishes blooming, i usually head to oregon and see the top growers there. i take 10s of 1000s of pics and have a photographic memory, so with all my visits, research and pics i do get a good grasp on many many iris. i feel pretty confident in the id i was just given because i see so many growers and had a hunch it was suttons prior to my quest. i am sure i will run across this in my travels now that i have a name and will be able to tell in person, but i agree the avg person pops in the forum with a koolaid smelling iris and walks away forever trading with some name just tossed in the ring and no further research... i wanted this ones name because i love it, being a space ager and newer looking iris i knew this could be id-ed, i didn't even bother posting the 3 pink medians i have, to me its just to iffy to even bother...
on the flip side, i do offer names if i think its a possibility, no harm is pointing someone in the right direction, with 60,000 names out there, its nice to try and help!

Snow Flurry will be blooming in a couple of days, so I will be able to compare it, but I'll be surprised if it's that one.

Be careful about assuming that someone (such as myself) would irresponsibly assign a name to an iris. I would not do that unless I was had the named variety from a reputable grower growing in my garden to compare it.

OPPS, sorry, i thought i lost my post last night, i see i posted it here by mistake to the other thread...

Alicia:
Sometimes determining what an iris is NOT is just as impt in finding a real ID. I can tell you this about SNOW FLURRY: The bud is really light blue; check grandma's white for bud color. If its not cool light blue, then its definitely not SF.
Laetitia

Laetitia,
I will check my Snow Flurry (an extra from Superstition --- you have to love them) later when it stops raining. It may be developed enough by now to tell me something.

In the future I plan to order Kashmir White (or maybe I did this year, I can't remember) to see how it compares.

I checked the developing bud on Snow Flurry -- it is baby blue, so Eva's white (DH's grandmother's name was Eva) is definitely not Snow Flurry. I think the flower on Snow Flurry is going to be much smaller too, although it may be too soon to tell.

Alicia:
I do not think your iris is KASHMIR WHITE. KW is much older than your cultivar. In fact KW was one of the first tetraploids that resulted from a diploid x middle eastern tetraploid cross. Floppier than yours. If it is not SNOW FLURRY (which is a surprisingly modern iris for its day), I suspect it is a 50's iris. Check the bud count. If it has a low count (4 or under) it is earlier rather than later, but by 'earlier' I mean 40's.
Laetitia

Laetitia,

Thank you for your feedback on this. I appreciate it.
I agree, I don't think this iris looks extremely old-fashioned. I have other iris from her garden which look much older than this one. So I would also think the white iris was from the '50's or perhaps even later. Eva did trade with friends up until 20 or 25 years ago, and some of them did buy new iris.

The bud count for most of the white iris is 5 or 6.

The flower is actually a bit bigger than Jesse's Song. It has good substance too. How early did big blooms start showing up? As early as the teens? later? I thought of starting a thread asking about characteristics that might roughly date an iris to a decade. I remember Walter Moores commenting on some of his seedlings being throwbacks to the '70s look and I wondered what that meant.

Alicia:
there are certain 'characteristics' that are common to the various iris periods, but no specifics that would peg it on the money. You can't predict what people are going to consider worthy of registering, and I have seen some 90's iris that I would have sworn were 50's types!
As for large size, this is not a modern phenomenon. There was a period in the 30's that hybridizers strove for size (yes the blooms were a mess, flopping all over the place!) The largest blooms I have ever seen were...Wm Setchell! Which is a 1938 iris.
Here are a few guideposts: Pre 1930, almost all iris were diploids...which are smaller than modern iris. That is why SNOW FLURRY is so impt: it was a cross between diploid and tetraploid..the first truly modern iris. Your white iris has the 'modern' form, so there is no way it is earlier than SF.
Modern iris have wide hafts, non-droopy falls and high bud count per stalk. Your (4-5)bud count
sounds like it belongs in the 50's-60's. Today hybridizers do not intro an iris with such a low bud count(usually!)
I'll bet Walter Moores comment about throwbacks had to do with the width of the falls. Lots of seedlings are still showing up with narrower falls, and they are almost always tossed by hybridizers.
If you want to see some progression according to decade of bearded iris development, go check out the HIPS website where Mike has enabled a decade-drop down listing of iris.
Laetitia

Here is a link that might be useful: HIPS

Laeitia,
Thank you. Most of the white iris have a 5-6 bud count rather than 4-5, if that makes any difference; I'll have to go out and see how that compares to the Jesse's Song that I have. 5-6 did seem low to me in comparison to very modern iris.

I just went outside and counted 7 on one of the white iris. Most do have 5 or 6. That count doesn't seem much higher than my Jesse's Song, which I got from Cooley's. OK, here I am exposing my ignorance: is the bud count for one stalk? Does each mother rhizome only produce 1 stalk? I have clumps of Jesse's Song with more than one stalk, so each clump has a dozen flowers, but perhaps it just has more than one flowering rhizome.

Never mind, I just looked up bud count and it must be for one stalk. :) A nursery stated that Jesse's Song typically has a bud count of 7-8. Most of my Jesse's Song have a bud count of 6. Not optimal but good enough for me. Actually I'm glad it's not higher, because with too many buds on one stalk, the stalks inevitably fall after a good rain.

Bud count can also be dependent on the quality of soil, as I discovered a few years ago when a particularly happy clump of Dauntless gave me a stalk with 15 buds on five branches, with the lowest two branches themselves having branches. Very rich soil, ideal location, well established clump.

As to characteristics of periods for irises, here's a few things I've picked up. Please keep in mind this is just in general and there are always exceptions to the rule.

- The more ruffles/lace the more modern it is. The smoother/less ruffled, the older.

- Poor substance is usually a sign of age, the thicker the substance the newer.

- As you move forward in the decades more flare appeared in the falls, and more 'dome' in the standards.

- True pinks, clean yellows, whites, oranges and browns were later refinements. Earlier irises were almost exclusively shades of purple, red-violet, blue-violet, lavenders, orchids or muddy yellows and creamy whites. Variegatas are excluded from this, as they sometimes did had clean color tones (such as Honorabile).

Hope that helps a bit.

Mike

Mike,
Thanks. This one is pure white, and has good substance. The standards do form a rounded dome shape, and the standards do not flare as much or are as ruffled as Jesse's Song. My guess originally was that this iris was from the '60-'70's, mostly based on the size and substance of the bloom, and the high probability that an iris from the '70's would have been the most modern iris she would have had.

I wish I could describe the fragrance. It's very nice. Not like a pallida however.

Mike is right about the lack of substance in the older iris. I am a fan of historic iris and grow a lot both named and NOID. The modern iris I grow generally last much longer than most of historics. The same is even more apparent if you use iris as cut flowers which my wife does all the time. Some of the newer iris just last and last. What I really like is when one stalk with several buds opens mostly one at at time and can last more than 2 weeks. Mike I don't know if you remember or not but I am the one that was looking for a photo of Floradora. Mine bloomed this spring and I have a photo when I get my film developed. I am trying very hard to make it match the description in the check list but I have my doubts. I know the lady that sold it to me really thought that what it was but names could have gotten switched. I know she did not just pick a name. Lee Mincy

I just counted TWELVE on one stalk on an old-fashioned pink/purple noid. This iris, which I found next to our driveway and went with an old farmhouse that no longer exists, hadn't bloomed for 3 or 4 years because it was too crowded by other things. In fact I thought I didn't have this iris anymore; voles ate several of them, the only iris voles have killed in my garden so far. So I was very happy to see it bloom this spring. The sweet scent and small flowers makes me believe it's a pallida descendent; I plan to order Caprice to see how closely it matches up.

Alicia:
I'd love to see a picture of your pink/purple noid...if you have one to post! Have you considered QUAKLER LADY as its id?
Just to clarify the number-of-blooms on a bloomstalk issue, you are almost certainly looking at a diploid, and some of the bushy clumpy ones can have very many blooms per stalk.
But with the tetraploid iris that is where you see quantity of bloom increase with each passing decade.
Laetitia

Laetitia,
I took some pictures of the pink/purple noid this morning. I'll post them after I get them developed. This iris does have a stalk with two branches and twelve buds, which have opened two to three at a time. The flowers may look a little wind-whipped due to the high winds we've had the last 3 days!

I agree that this iris is a diploid, and old. I ordered Quaker Lady this year after seeing a picture of it that Mike (garden of mu) posted here or on his website, so next year I may be able to compare the two.

Sorry but I disagree that it is a diploid. It has reasonable substance and is as tall as the Jesse's Song around it. i don't understand why Laetitia thinks this is a diploid?

We think the pink/purple noid (not yet pictured) is a diploid, and that the white is a tetraploid. The white isn't all that old -- I was guessing from the '70's perhaps.

Here is a closeup of the white iris. These blossoms are a bit on the old side and just been through two days of rain, so they look a little worse for wear. The original photo and the file on my computer shows more detail than the photo in picturetrail -- the image must just be too large for picturetrail. There is some faint venation at the top of the falls.

A very pretty iris. I think the lack of ruffling and the narrow hafts would put this in the 50s-60s though - it just doesn't look like 70s to me..

Quaker Lady is very distinctive once you've grown it for a bit. Just a really nice old variety and hold sup well to moderns of the same size class, IMO.

Mike

Thanks Mike!

I knew IDing this white iris was a slim possibility. For me the resulting discussion was worth the effort.

Here are a couple pictures of the pink-purple noid. I took the picture in strong morning sunlight, which I should not have done, because in the first photo the iris turned out looking more purple than it really is. The second photo is blurry but the color is truer.

{{gwi:1017036}}

Alicia:
That is neither QUAKER LADY or CAPRICE. Looks 20's ish. I don't know the name but I will look around and see if I have anything that seems close that I can post here
By the way it IS lovely, and if every you want to trade a piece let me know.
Laetitia

Laeitia,
I'd be happy to trade! As soon as it's done blooming I'll send you an e-mail and divide it up.