Please help ID these!

This entry is overrun with unnamed Iris images: http://plantsdatabase.com/go/206/index.html - if you-all can ID a few of them, I'd love to be able to move them to their respective homes. (I have a hard time thinning seedlings, and an equally hard time removing perfectly nice images. But with 27 of them in this entry, I'm going to have to turn a few out pretty soon. ;o)

Terry,

As much as I'd like to be able to help, it is virtually impossible to positively ID an iris from a single photo (or even multiple photos). Not only can the same iris look very different at different times of day, under different lighting conditions, and at different points during its bloom cycle, but different cameras, different films, and different computer monitors can dramatically alter the images seen by each individual viewer. Add to that the fact that there may be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of cultivars that look very much alike and differ significantly only in terms of plant characteristics *other than* bloom, and you end up with an impossible situation for photo IDs.

In case that doesn't complicate matters enough, Iris germanica is incorrectly used as a species name for bearded irises. I. germanica is not a species at all. Rather, it is a natural intermediate hybrid of unknown origin and does not even appear in the ancestry of modern tall bearded irises.

I imagine you'd like to smack me upside the head right about now. ;-)

Laurie

nahhh, no smacking urges here. It's what I had suspected, but hope springs eternal and all that ;o)

I agree with removing the germanica epithet - it's on my to-do's as I clean up that entry ;o)

Terry,

As long as this has come up, I hope you'll indulge me while I voice my thoughts on the accuracy of the photos in the PDB. Though it would be possible to come up with named cultivars that look similar to the ones on the thread you posted above, I strongly believe it would be a huge disservice to the iris industry and iris gardeners to post "lookalikes" on named cultivar pages in the PDB.

The PDB gives the impression of being an authoritative resource to many of the people who visit it. Those people will rely on the photos in the PDB to be accurate representations and may use them to compare with and identify their own unknown plants. As bad an idea as photo ID is when using accurately identified photos, the problem becomes even worse when making comparisons with lookalikes that very well may not be the named cultivar at all.

I feel the PDB has an obligation to post only photos that are uploaded under their accurate names and NOT to try to re-identify misidentified photos or to try to find names of plants that are uploaded without a cultivar name at all.

I admire your work with the PDB, Terry, and I know you have a sincere interest in helping develop a reliable, accurate resource here. I also know how hard it is to discard lovely images. But sometimes small sacrifices must be made to maintain the integrity of the project as a whole.

Keep up the good work,

Laurie

Good points, all. And all taken ;o)

What I'm leaning toward with this entry is preserving a handful (six or eight) images that will help a user recognize a Tall Bearded Iris when they see one, and differentiate between this class of Iris and others - closeups of leaves, beards, seedpods, falls, etc. that make it possible to recognize an Iris, and to distinguish it as a TB. The other unnamed images will simply have to go - it's long overdue, and the more images we have, the more the entry seems to attract (kind of like the dust bunnies under my bed.)

Is anyone up to:

a) nominating a few of the existing images that should remain; and

b) providing some good additional "technical" shots of a TB?

Hmm. That's tough because, depending on the context of the photo, many BBs and IBs can look very much like TBs in close-up without a scale reference, particularly with the current fad of breeding TBs with horizontal falls.

I suggest you choose photos that represent the range of TBs: historic (tailored form, pendant falls, narrow hafts, no ruffling), modern (ruffled with heavy substance, wide hafts, and horizontal or semi-pendant falls), as well as different colors and patterns (so newbies can learn that TBs don't come *only* in purple), and a good stalk shot demonstrating typical branching (particularly one taken next to a yardstick to show height).

Laurie