Iris takes the name of the Greek goddess of the rainbow, messenger between the gods and the earth, and the genus makes good on the claim across a range of blues, violets, coppers, and whites. The irises grown here are not the bearded border kinds but the species: woodland runners, wet-ground natives, and a few old garden plants from East Asia with long human histories behind them.

Iris tectorum is the roof iris, and the story told of the name is that a wartime decree left no ground to spare for anything but food, so Japanese households moved the plants up onto the thatched ridgelines. The rhizomes were worth the trouble: ground to a white powder, they went into the face paint of the period. Iris cristata and Iris verna are small Southeastern woodlanders that knit into a shaded slope and slip away by midsummer. Iris fulva, the copper iris, and Iris virginica want the opposite: sun, and ground that stays wet, which makes them the straightforward answer to a pond edge or a rain garden. Match the species to the site and this is one of the easiest genera in the catalog.