Can't find the perfect Iris? Make your own! Dr. Kenneth Kidd, professor of genetics at Yale University, talks about breeding Iris and gives us a basic, down to earth introduction to Iris genetics and hybridizing.One of my interests since I was in high school, 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 that's in tomatoes, but simply pale. The yellow is the same pigment that's in carrots but again a bit different. The blue is a completely different set of pigments called anthocyanins. White is basically absence of all of those pigments.
One can get different combinations if you have a plant 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 keratins, 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 with 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.
You'll notice that some of these, there are multiple branches so there are more flowers per plant and that's close to the ideal. That one is very tall there are others that are much shorter and that's one of the fascinations I find with all tremendous variety.
The structure of the iris flower is there are a total of six petals; three up standards, three down falls. The inside of the flower has what are called three style arms. On the fall petals -- at least in the garden varieties --there is what's called a beard. Here you can see it's a much darker color but it's still in that lycopene/carotene family of pigments. Reproduction of the flower involves a bee following this in and here, below is the anther with pollen on it. As the bee gets nectar, that pollen is rubbed on its back. The next flower it goes to, it fertilizes. This little lip is the stigma that pollen is placed on. So when the bee with pollen on its back goes into the next flower, it rubs that pollen on this stigma. The pollen germinates, sends down and fertilizes down here in the ovary that becomes a seedpod.
One of the reasons there are so many different iris varieties, colors and patterns is that literally hundreds of backyard gardeners and enthusiasts will breed irises, plant the seeds, and if they get a new and different flower they can introduce it commercially and sell it. There's a way of registering names internationally so two different varieties don't get the same name but it gives rise to huge numbers of variant flowers, patterns, width structure, just a plethora of interesting garden plants.
Why am i interested in irises? Pure happenstance. I started raising some actually when i was in the seventh and eighth grade and neighbors gave me some plants with different colored flowers. I was fascinated, and i wondered what would happen if I crossed a yellow iris with a blue iris would I get a green iris? And so I started going to the library and found out that how to study those was called genetics, and that's what led me into genetics.
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