Bearded iris

About the plant

Sibthorp and Bauer found the bearded iris everywhere they went, on the roofs and walls and in the cemeteries of Greece and the islands, and Bauer drew it with the fat creeping rhizome exposed, the fan of grey leaves and the big purple flowers, each lower petal carrying the fuzzy yellow beard that gives the group its name. Smith placed it in the first volume of Flora Graeca in 1806 under Linnaeus's name, Iris germanica, which is a misnomer: the plant is not German and probably not wild anywhere, but a hybrid raised in gardens so long ago that it has naturalised across the whole Mediterranean and the Near East.

It is the oldest ornamental in the world, or nearly. The reliefs of Thutmose III at Karnak, carved about 1450 BC, show irises among the plants brought back from Syria; the stylised flower became the fleur-de-lis of the kings of France and the lily of Florence; and the pale form, Iris florentina, grown in fields around Florence for a thousand years, gave the perfumers orris root, the dried rhizome whose violet scent fixed every perfume and powdered every wig of the eighteenth century. The beard has a purpose: it guides the bee down into the flower and brushes it with pollen on the way out.