Showing posts with label misidentified. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misidentified. Show all posts

Monday, July 4, 2022

Iris Identification: A Puzzle and a Problem

by Bob Pries

A short time ago I was asked if I could identify an iris. When I looked at the picture I thought “Wow, this is one I would love to grow also.” My favorite colors are brown and blue so I was eager to find the answer.

 Unknown iris

One of the first steps I took was to complete a reverse image search in Google Images. It is simple. You go to images.google.com and click on the camera icon in the search box.  A screen will open to search by image. I chose the option to upload the image I saved.

The camera icon is shown above the arrow


Instantly Google Images gives you the 30 best matches. On my first try the image did not appear and the choices were interesting but barely similar. But I tried again later and to my delight the exact image appeared as the first choice. There several things to try next and each might head me in a different direction.  So I looked at the image Google had chosen at the top of the page and clicked on it. I noted that below that top image it noted there were 264 pages that featured this image.

Google Image search results


When I clicked on the search result, Google displayed each result for the image with the URL and title. Almost all the pages featuring this image were ads for various irises (most of which had no relation at all to the iris of interest.) But one search result caught my eye. It was Dave’s Garden and appeared to have a cultivar name attached. I clicked on the image and the Dave’s Garden page came up with a description for an intermediate iris named ‘Wrong Song.'  At last, I had a name!

Just to be sure, I searched for ‘Wrong Song’ in the Iris Encyclopedia, a wiki of the American Iris Society. This wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedic source of iris information and is curated by persons who serve as docents for iris-specific content. To my consternation, an iris with a very different appearance appeared in the encyclopedia entry for 'Wrong Song.' 

Iris 'Wrong Song' in the Iris Encyclopedia

The shape and color patterning were very close, but it seemed obvious that the image I was trying to identify had been colorized and photo-shopped to appear very different. My mind started thinking about the 264 internet pages that were using this altered picture. Although many were just using it as a generic iris picture, others were terribly misrepresenting this iris ‘Wrong Song.’ My heart started to hurt. You see, this isn't the first time people have been singing the wrong song about an iris. 

When the American Iris Society (AIS) was formed in the 1920s, one of its main goals was to clear up iris identification. Today the central mission of the AIS is to register irises. Registration provides a unique name for an iris and is accompanied by an official description. The goal is to prevent two different irises from having the same name or for any one iris to be given several names making communication difficult. 

It took two decades of work in the nineteen twenties and thirties to straighten out the many names that had been casually used for irises. The AIS had to plant test gardens and consult historical descriptions to determine which names were the most legitimate for which irises. It is discouraging to discover two irises on the internet today with the same name. One is the accurate registered iris, and the other is a mythical, colorized-version of the original.

There are a number of iris photos that have been colorized and published on the internet. Some, like the one I searched for, are quite beautiful. However, we should avoid naming a heavily-altered photo using the name of the iris from which it was derived. Someone purchasing an iris by this name may suffer sadness when the iris does not live up to their expectations.

Monday, June 15, 2015

An Iris by Any Other Name

by Tom Waters

'Catchy Name' (Seligmann, 1983)
One of the things you may notice about serious iris enthusiasts (sometimes known as “irisarians”), as opposed to gardeners who casually grow a few, is an obsession with names. We go around earnestly correcting the names of irises people share on line or in person, sometimes even to the point of calling out minor spelling errors.

What is this about? Surely the flower’s loveliness and welcome presence in our gardens doesn’t depend on its name. Why is it so important to some of us enthusiasts?

It’s one of those things that most of us get very much indoctrinated about, early on in the learning process, as the iris hobby becomes more and more serious. It’s been part of iris culture for generations.

At one time, you see, names were in a state of chaos. The same plant would be passed around under any number of different names, and similar plants were sold or shared under the same name. Names would be casually translated from one language to another, with no one quite sure if they were meant to refer to the same plant or not. One of the first goals of the American Iris Society in the 1920s was to try to straighten out the confusion, by carefully documenting names from old magazine articles and catalogs and compiling a checklist. The American Iris Society is the international registration authority for all irises except those that grow from bulbs (like Dutch Iris and reticulatas). Ideally, every name is registered with the AIS along with a careful description before the iris it belongs to is sold or shared.

Iris pallida variegata, sometimes grown under the incorrect name "Zebra"
Without this care, the names become practically meaningless, and one cannot reliably purchase a particular cultivar or discuss its qualities with other growers.

This is especially important because so many irises resemble others, at least at first glance. Casual gardeners may be inclined to think that all pink irises are the same, or that the one they just bought from a garden center is “the same iris” grandma grew years ago, because they are both purple.

Any time an iris is sold or shared under an incorrect name, it makes headaches for those further down the line who want to know which iris they actually have.

Irises whose names are unknown are these days often called “noids” (for “no ID”). The term is cute and memorable, but alas it’s too close to the name of a well-known hybridizer of some decades past, Luella Noyd, so I prefer to avoid it. I’ve also seen them spoken of as UFOs (unidentified flowering objects).
 
The Internet has taken the problem of identifying irises to a whole new level. It has made it 100 times easier to get information on any subject, but 10,000 easier to get bad information on any subject, it seems. Every day, people post photos of irises asking for the name, and often just accept the first answer someone throws out. That can be worse than having no answer at all!

Very few irises are so distinctive that they can be unambiguously identified at a glance from a single photo. The only way to check a tentative identification is to acquire the true plant from a reliable source and grow it alongside your own. They should be identical in detail.

BB 'Oops' (Craig, 2003)
So what is a “reliable source”? The “big box” stores are notorious in selling mislabeled irises. Local garden centers are better, but still make quite a few mistakes. Iris sellers on Ebay are all over the map in terms of reliability. Your best bet is to stick to sellers who specialize in irises. Even that is not foolproof. A few years ago, I ordered the iris ‘Orange Crush’ from an iris grower with impeccable credentials. When it bloomed, it was not even the right color! I wrote to him and inquired about it. It turns out he grows his plants in alphabetical order, and the one I got was the previous one in the alphabet. Its name? ‘Oops’. That gave us a chuckle.

Some name confusions have been going on for so long that it can be quite difficult to sort them out. When I started growing irises in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the 1970s, a number of local growers had a historic iris ‘Mme. Chereau’. We all loved it, not least because it had been around since 1844! It turned out the plant we were all growing was actually an even older cultivar, ‘Swerti’. But because we had all seen it in each others’ gardens, we “knew” it was ‘Mme. Chereau’.  A photo of the impostor even made it into the American Iris Society book, The World of Irises, showing how difficult it can be to be sure of identifications, even on the best authority.
'Mme. Chereau' (Lemon, 1844)
photo: Mike Starhill
'Swerti'
Aware of this long-standing confusion, I resolved a couple years ago to grow these two irises in my garden and familiarize myself with their differences. Ironically, the ‘Mme. Chereau’ I acquired to make the comparison turned out to be – you guessed it! – ‘Swerti’.

A word of caution: The on-line Iris Encyclopedia, although hosted by the American Iris Society, is (like Wikipedia) maintained by users, and is not authoritative. The entries for some irises have incorrect photos.

For older irises, the Historic Iris Preservation Society is the best source of identification expertise. HIPS is home to experts who have made identification of older cultivars into a passion, delving into the subject with persistence and dedication, unearthing old photographs, documents, and descriptions. There are some confusions so old and entrenched, however, that even the experts can hold different views. Some irises have had whole articles and book chapters written about them, as researchers struggle to sort out their identity.

But you don’t have to be an expert to help with the problem of misidentified irises. Anyone can help by following one simple rule: don’t pass an iris around unless you are sure it is correctly named. If it came to you without a name, this will often mean growing the real thing side by side with your orphan. Even passing an iris on saying that you don’t know its name is not a good idea. Inevitably, someone down the line will be growing it and decide they “know” what it is anyway!

A second bit of advice: Don’t become indignant or defensive when someone tells you your iris is misidentified. It’s not a criticism, it’s a gift of better information than you had before! A thank-you is the appropriate response.

unidentified yellow TB
Some growers just destroy anything they are not sure of. That’s one way solve the problem, but sometimes an unidentified iris just pleads with you to give it a home. When we moved into our present house, there were some irises growing on the property. They turned out to be a yellow tall bearded, apparently of mid-twentieth-century vintage. They outperform almost everything else I grow, with tall stalks, clear color, and a long period of bloom. It’s hard to say good-bye to one of the best irises you have! I suspect this iris is the classic variety ‘Ola Kala’, but I will not share it under that name until such time as it passes the side-by-side test.