Among the wild irises of North America, Iris fulva is the one that broke the color rules. Where the family runs to blues, purples, and yellows, the copper iris opens in warm coppery red to burnt orange, a shade no other native iris offers, carried on slender stems in late spring and early summer with a soft, slightly drooping poise. The Latin fulva, meaning tawny or reddish-brown, records that unusual color, and the common names, copper iris and red iris, say the same thing more plainly.
A small crested iris with the carriage of an orchid and a quietly extraordinary biography. Iris japonica was named by Carl Peter Thunberg in 1794. Thunberg was a protege of Linnaeus and one of the only Western botanists allowed into Japan during the country's closed period, from 1775 to 1778, so much of what he brought back is, in a real sense, the first documented record of Japanese flora in Western science. The species had already reached Europe two years earlier, carried out of China by Thomas Evans of the East India Company in 1792. By the 1820s Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the same artist whose rose paintings turn up on every aunt's tea tray, was painting the plant under the older name Iris fimbriata in his Choix des plus belles Fleurs. A treasure of cultivated gardens for more than two centuries.
The horticulturist Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, sets the scene: the Japanese roof iris, Iris tectorum, is famous in the native country as a flower for planting on sod roofs, just as houseleeks are used on the cottage roofs of France. In gardens the silky green fans of leaves form large patches, a fine subject for the foreground of a shady border, and in April the ruffled, orchid-like blooms appear among the handsome leaves. In the common form these are a rich mottled blue with white crests; even lovelier, Ogden adds, are the white, yellow-crested blooms of the form offered here.
The horticulturist Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, sets the scene: the Japanese roof iris, Iris tectorum, is famous in the native country as a flower for planting on sod roofs, just as houseleeks are used on the cottage roofs of France. In gardens the silky green fans of leaves form large patches, a fine subject for the foreground of a shady border, and in April the ruffled, orchid-like blooms appear among the handsome leaves. This is the common form, in which the flowers open a rich mottled blue, veined and freckled toward the center, with white crests.
Iris verna is one of those plants that feels like a secret, small, fragrant, and impossibly charming once noticed. Native to the pinewoods and sandy slopes of the eastern United States, this understated iris has been a spring companion for centuries, brightening forest floors long before gardeners thought to give the plant a place at home.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of the wetlands, streambanks, and floodplains of the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Florida and west to Texas. Sometimes called Virginia willow for the shape of the leaves, though the plant is no willow at all, the species is prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and for a fall display of orange, red, and burgundy that rivals far showier shrubs. 'Henry's Garnet' is the selection that made the species a garden staple, free-flowering, with six-inch white racemes and a deep maroon-purple fall color that gives the plant its name.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a brilliant fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Little Henry' is the dwarf of the clan, a low, mounded selection that reaches only about three feet, packing the fragrant flowers and fiery fall color of the full-sized sweetspires into a tidy, compact plant for smaller spaces.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Longspire' is the selection chosen for its flowers: a form that carries notably long, white racemes, arching sprays of small fragrant blooms that outdo the wild plant for length and presence in early summer.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and brilliant fall color. 'Sarah Eve' is the exception in the family, the first pink sweetspire: the small flowers are essentially white, but they are carried on rosy-pink pedicels that tint the whole arching raceme a soft, distinctive pale pink, a color no other Itea offers.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow. Itea yunnanensis is the Yunnan sweetspire, an evergreen species from southwestern China, close to the Chinese sweetspire but lower and more spreading, with more leathery, darker green leaves that are somewhat holly-like and toothed on juvenile plants and smooth-edged at maturity. In spring the plant carries slender four-inch racemes of small white flowers.
