One of my interests, since I was in high school, which given the grey you can tell was a few
years ago, has been the genetics of the flower patterns in Irises and how we get so much
variation.
So there are really two different pigments, there's carotene; a carotenoid pigment that
is yellow or pink.
The pink is basically very pale, but it's the same pigment as in tomatoes, but simply
pale.
The yellow is the same pigment that's in carrots, but again, a bit different.
And the blue is a completely different set of pigments called anthocyanins.
White is basically absence of all of those pigments and one can get different combinations.
If you have a with both the blue and the yellow pigments, it looks more brown.
But depending upon the ratio of the pigments, you can get a variety of different colors.
Here is a plant where the standards, the upper petals, are very pale and the lower petals
are more darkly pigmented.
That's an inherited trait that affects anthocyanin, the blue pigment family.
It doesn't really exist for the carotenes, the yellow and pink family.
So one can get brown standards and darker, more purple falls by the combinations of the
different ones.
In this group, there is a very fancy pigmentation pattern of light, no pigment in the center,
a lot of dots and then a band around the edge.
And here, you see a different version.
It's a little lighter, but not so much and it's not dots so much as lines, variation,
but still a darker border around the edge.
And exactly how those are inherited is not yet clear, but I'm doing some of the work
on trying to figure it out.
It's a hobby.
It's not super science, though very complex science, but, it helps in trying to understand
how one can plan crosses to improve the garden qualities.
And you'll notice, that some of these there are multiple branches, almost candelabra style,
so there are more flowers per plant.
That's close to the ideal.
That one is very tall.
There are others that are much shorter.
That's one of the fascinations, I find, with all of these.
Tremendous variety, one can get a rainbow of colors and in fact, it's often considered
that the Iris is a rainbow flower.