A few years ago through a robin, I received seed of a yellow flowered I. foetidissima from Australia. It was a beautiful flower with very little brown in it and was simply called `Citron', although it did not fit the registered description. Somehow, in the Great Move, I arrived without that plant and thought I was mistaken in its coloring as the yellow flowered form commonly grown in the Pacific Northwest has deep chocolate brown on the lower parts of the standards and falls. By chance, I was able to see both yellow forms in bloom last spring and was relieved to know I was not loosing it altogether. I. foetidissima is a plant, I think, too little grown and -appreciated for its color varieties, both in flower and foliage. We often encounter a clump of this iris tucked away in some obscure corner of a public park, but the flower color is invariably the dull tan and violet variety. The lilac variety, Nant Gwilw, is seldom offered in commerce and it would not surprise me if what is often offered is not true to name. There are large and beautiful clumps of the variegated form growing in the Bellevue Botanic Garden, WA, and it is seen in gardening circles here in the Pacific Northwest, but it is rarely available in commerce. In other areas, it is a sought after and treasured garden prize.

We received a letter from Mrs. Anne Blanco-White recently on I. foetzdissima which we quote from. I hope she will pardon the intrusion.

"As I say, all too often, this plant has had a very bad press over the years and it was sheer bad luck really that they picked on such a dim version of the flowers to describe officially so no one has done any serious work on them.

"The range of yellows is prodigious and very variable in quality. I'm enclosing a few slides of forms seen in England. Let me say that the best way to grow them quickly is in a very rich and rather damp soil. My classic story is of the nursery owner to whom I first gave some of the white berried plant. She parked it carefully down the garden where the visitors wouldn't see it before she was ready to launch it. It was, in fact, just below the cress-pit and to her horror this overflowed without being noticed for some days. Well, she waved the plants goodbye and wondered how she was going to explain it to me. As luck would have it the plants said `goody, goody' and were ready for sale well before she had expected.

"I did a little research on my own account into sources which I should have consulted earlier and here are the results: . Year Books (actually a bulletin): 2:p.24 Arthur Hort. `I do not remember to have discussed (I. foetidissima) with Foster, but through the kindness of other friends, I grow two interesting forms; besides the ordinary one, a taller one collected in Algiers, whose seed capsules are even showier in autumn than those of the ordinary form, and a yellow-flowered form, most beautifully marked in a quiet way, which seeds true and is an ornament to my bit of garden.'

"Lynch in The Book of the Iris 1923: `A variety, citrina, is recognized in English botany, and has flowers wholly pale yellow, without purple lines. It occurs in the Isle of Wight and in Dorset.' Now that is interesting since I have a form from Dorset and will have a good look at it. According to Clive Innes, who did a great deal of research even if some botanists inevitably quibble over some of his classifications, citrina was described by Syme and he gives var. lutescens Maire as the form found in Algiers.

"Judging from my slide, the iris the RHS is growing as citrina isn't true to name, but it could all to disastrously well be Miss Lindsay's form. I had that once and could only conclude that her taste and mine in iris flowers did not jell. It was yellow and had the longest falls for their width that I've seen anywhere. It promptly developed a serious virus and died. This is rare though Peter Maynard seems to manage it as a matter of course.

"As you will see, the coloring of the yellows can vary enormously. This one of Richard Nutt's from the Picos de Europa is definitely the best and I am pretty sure it has to be the Algerian form probably brought into Spain by the Moors as a matter of nice gardening; no photograph, I'm afraid. There is also a good one, as Lynch noted, from Dorsetshire and I have plants of that. Then there is `Chinese Yellow'. The trouble with that plant is that I have not so far been able to find any source for the name. My plant came from Margery Fish's garden in the West Country and is a good form.

"One of the troubles in trying to classify these variations is the joyous enthusiasm with which this plants seeds. And naturally the new plants start a stems length from the plant and are the obvious ones to dig up and give away under the `name'. Quite as bad as I. unguicularis cultivars,

"And for fun, I've enclosed a couple of slides of white flowered forms which show considerable variation, too. Indeed, I think I have plants where white and yellow have crossed because usually the standards and styles are yellow while the falls are a very, very pale cream.

"Yes, well, this clearly requires a lot more investigation which I can't undertake until the autumn and my son has taught me properly how to use the library computers. Meantime, I think it should be made clear, if there is still time, that any specific classification of a foetidissima form should be regarded with great suspicion and I'll write, including these extracts, to Bob Pries and say so."

We thank Mrs. Blanco-White for these comments and especially for the interesting slides. They are in the SIGNA collection and we hope you will take advantage of their availability. Mrs. Blanco-White wrote an article several years ago which appeared in the Royal Hort The Garden where she mentioned a white and yellow berried plant of I. foetidissima. The article stated that the plants do not come true from seed, however. Has anyone in this country ever grown a variation of this iris other than the tan-violet flower or the orange-red berried form? If so, we would be most interested to hear about them, as they are among the best kept secrets in irisdom.

-Colin Rigby

Reprinted by permission from the SIGNA newsletter, number 57

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