I had a visitor to my website ask me if I could help them identify an old iris she remembered from her mother's ranch. She said the ranch was there prior to 1960 so that at least gives us a date to work back from.

She also said it had a distinct root beer fragrance.

The difficulty comes from her description of the iris; "dark cinnamon brown that lightens up with flakes of yellow/gold and turquoise and light gold and blue on the edges."

'Oasis Root Beer' (Keith Chadwick, 2004) kind of fits her description, except for the date of introduction.

Any suggestions?

Thank you!

Randy Smith

I looked through the historic iris society webpage and noted a few possibilities. But none mention fragrance---not usually something that was included in descriptions at that time. Might not have been a registered iris. This person might be happy with Oasis Root Beer if it is the fragrance that evokes the memories.
(note: some of these may be more reddish than brown):
Tobacco Road
Tabasco 1950s intro--quite pretty actually
Spanish Lady
Royal Scot

Good luck!

Where does the description come from? It is pretty detailed for just being a memory from 64 or more years ago. Does she have any pictures?

Leslie,

That is apparently from her memory. No photos available.

I wondered a bit about the specifics. Sometimes our 'memories' can be somewhat enhanced by emotion, I think.

Laurie,

Thank you for the suggestions. I'll e-mail her links to those images. And I'll see if I can find any mention of fragrance in old catalogs. That's the biggest problem with identifying intensely-fragrant iris cultivars. Fragrance was just so rarely mentioned in old catalogs. A real mystery to me. I consider fragrance 'mandatory' for inclusion in my garden. Sorry if that offends some...

Gingersnap has a root beer fragrance and was introduced in 1965.. Maybe a little too late, but I've found memories aren't always accurate. There's often a little blue streak under the beard. It's quite a bit darker when first opening, and pales out a bit with age, so you'll see a lot of variation in pictures.


"Brown" iris were very popular in the 40's and 50's, I believe.. There are many..
I recently ran across this one, but there is no mention of scent, but the coloring matches your description..
https://historiciris.org/galle...

Seems to me there was a subject line some years back regarding scented Iris, or maybe root beer scented iris.. My download speed is frustratingly slow tonight, otherwise I'd try to seek it out for you.