I realize that this may be an impossible question to answer. Any guesses on what iris variety this might be? It came from an old home site. ("old" being first settled in the 1860s, I think. That's old for CA. Of course I realize that the flower variety is not necessarily that old.) The flower is 2/3 to 3/4 the size of a typical tall bearded iris flower.
Look at the spathes around the flower (can't see them in the picture). If they are papery instead of green, it will be one of the older pallidas.
That is very close to one of mine. Measure the flower stem from the ground to the
highest blossom. I had some last year that were between 44 and 48 inches. The
stems were much thinner and stronger than a typical modern TB.
The top half of the spathes are papery. The bottom half is green. The plant is 37 inches tall. (It was planted last fall. Perhaps it isn't at full strength yet. I have no idea.)
Perhaps a cross with pallida?
That would be my guess, also. Does it smell like grape koolaid? And do the leaves look what you would call greyish green rather than the normal green of an iris leaf, and maybe a little floppy compared to other iris leaves. If so it is probably a pallida cross. And there's a lot of them. But it seems bluer than most of the pallidas to me, of course that could be from various things.
The flower is a little more purplish in real life than it looks in the photo. (I tried to get it correct but I don't have a real photo editor.) It smells like grape or rootbeer. The leaves are kind of floppy. They are less blue-green than the other irises (tall bearded) that are near it. To me, they appear to be more of a true green than a grey-green, but there is a plant with distinctly grey leaves nearby that may be influencing my perception.
Definitely sounds like a pallida cross then. There are so many of these, it would be impossible to tell if it was a named variety, or just a spontaneous cross. But you can call it pallida, and be botanically correct. And pallida is a species name, so it is not capitalized. So it's 'iris pallida'.
From Irises by Claire Austin:
"Sometimes called the dalmation iris, early hybridizers used this species as a parent to create other bearded irises,"
First listed by Lambert, 1789.
That would make sense, then, that it is able to survive in the wild or untended here, since the climate here is like that of Dalmatia.
