Cyan colored Iris?

Lee Poulsen wpoulsen@pacbell.net
Wed, 17 May 2006 09:50:48 PDT
As a few of you know, I've been accumulating a (very small) list of 
those plants (not just geophytes) that have flowers whose color falls 
in the cyan range of the spectrum. Other names for colors in this range 
are teal, aqua, aquamarine, blue-green, turquoise. It is a very 
striking color to see in a flower and the South Africans have two bulbs 
that appear on this list: Lachenalia viridiflora and Ixia viridiflora. 
A couple of other plants whose flowers are this color and look almost 
unreal are the Chilean bromeliad Puya alpestris and the tropical vine 
Strongylodon macrobotrys.

I was slowly thumbing through that new Iris book I mentioned a little 
while ago, and in the chapter on Pacific Coast Hybrids, in the 
description for the species Iris munzii, it described their typical 
color range and then said: "..., but in cultivation they can be 
turquoise to deep sky blue." These two colors are often what some 
people will use when trying to describe the color cyan. So my 
cyan-flower alert went off, and I decided to ask this knowledgeable 
group if they have seen these flowers and if what the author is 
describing here might be a cyan colored Iris? Does anyone have photos 
of it or know where there might be photos of this on the web? Is it 
cyan enough to include in the cyan-colored-flower list?

Thanks,
--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena, California, USDA Zone 10a


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