History Of Irises In The Garden

The first record of irises in the garden appears to be around 1479 B.C., sometime after King Thutmose III of Egypt conquered Syria. He had a plant specialist on his staff whose duty it was to find new plants for the king. King Thutmose Ill, who was a gardener, is said to have coveted plants the way some men covet gold. He wanted the flowers he saw in Syria - irises, tulips, lilies, roses and crocuses - to be taken home and planted in his own garden. Once the flowers were blooming in Egypt, he decided to commemorate his conquest of Syria by including flowers in his Temple of Amon at Karnak. To this day, sculptures of irises and the other captured flowers are on the temple wall.

During the twelfth-century Crusades, Louis VII of France arrived in Egypt, where he saw irises growing. It was he who adopted the iris as a symbol of his conquest and carried it back to France. He had the first fleur-de-lis carved on his coat of arms.

Irises are native to the Northern Hemisphere and will only reach their greatest perfection in the North Temperate Zone (but Will grow in the Southern Hemisphere). Irises grow to their southern limit on North Africa's coast and no farther south than that. One of the ice ages probably pushed them to that limit. The northern limit of irises is in northeastern Asia, the Gaspe Peninsula and Alaska.

Ancient Rome had its beginnings in the sixth century B.C. and, over the next several centuries, grew to encompass most of what is now Europe, North Africa and the countries on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. By the end of the second century A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the Mediterranean lands and encircled the sea, including Egypt and Syria where many irises grew. These ancient Romans established trading routes through-out the Mediterranean region. While wheat and olive oil were among the major traded commodities, irises and other ornamental plants were also transported by Roman ships. Iris roots were carried throughout the Roman Empire, including those lands north of the Mediterranean. Irises soon flourished in Roman gardens throughout the empire, including those lands north of the sea.

A couple of centuries after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., Islamic invasions swept from northern Africa and the Middle East across Europe and into the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, these invasions were known as the Moorish conquests. The Moors brought with them a rich heritage of plants, including cultivated plants, not the least of which were irises. They thrived in the walled gardens of the Moorish castles for many centuries. Most famous of these was the armed palace known as the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain.

The age of exploration began with Columbus's voyage in 1492. At that same time, his sponsors, Isabella and Ferdinand, drove the Moors from Spain. These two events, plus the consequential national friendships among Spain, Portugal and the Low Countries, including Holland, led to widespread distribution of the garden plants the Moors had brought. It was the talented plant growers and breeders of Holland who developed many of the early strains of English, Dutch, German and Spanish irises, ancestors of many of our own garden irises.

Irises were among the first ornamentals that came over on the ships with early settlers to the New World. They were on the plant lists of gardeners in Virginia as early as the 1600s. Even then, irises quickly became reliable mainstays of both home and public gardens throughout the young colonies. For many years, the only native iris the early colonists knew was the one they called blue flag. Later, they would discover others, including a dwarf iris from the Appalachian Mountains, the Louisiana iris and the Pacific Coast irises.

Sir Michael Foster (1836-1907) made many connections with plant collectors, missionaries and other friends throughout the world and thus was able to become the first person to seriously collect, grow and breed many iris species from the wild. Foster was the first in England to grow large irises from Asia Minor. These were naturally tetraploid irises that became responsible for some of the major improvements in our garden irises. Foster kept detailed records and drawings of his irises. He defined many of the wild species and gave them specific names. One of Foster's friends was William Rickatson Dykes (1877-1925). It was Foster's encouragement that set Dykes on his mission to study the entire genus. He believed that as a botanist he should not only study irises in the herbaria of Europe and America, but should also study them in the wild and grow them before writing about them. His own garden began with donations from Foster and then grew as iris seeds and plants came in from allover the world.

Today, Dykes's work is somewhat outdated, yet it was the first of its kind in the iris world and offered a solid base of knowledge. Today's taxonomists have new tools and greater knowledge to help them classify the irises. In Dykes's time, botanical classification was based primarily upon visible features such as seed shape, seedpod form and the structure of the tubular perianth that lies between the ovary and the flower. Today's botanists have access to chromosomal information and so can better tell the relationships among irises. There continue to be new irises discovered around the world and changes in classifications and the science of irises.

Comments

Back To Top