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Hello! I am a beginner iris enthusiast in Virginia 7b, hoping to make a fragrant, re-blooming space ager with an attractive color combination. I share your love for beautiful fragrant irises, as my childhood home in NH had a walkway lined on both sides with a non-variegated Iris Pallida that smelled so amazing each spring, that it made me fall in love with irises as a young boy. My question is: In your experiences with hybridization, have you discovered if the scent or strength of scent from an iris is more pod-parent related or more pollen parent related, or a mixture of both, or perhaps carried in a dormant fashion to reappear in future hybrid cultivars? Also, do you know if a strong scent or sweet scent is dominant, genetically speaking, as opposed to weak scent or musky/spicy?

First, "Thank you!" for contributing your iris fragrance descriptions to this forum! My hope is that this will become a reliable reference source for people who are searching for a fragrant iris from their past (Maybe something they remember from Grandma's garden?), trying to identify that wonderful NOID in their iris bed, or just looking for an iris with a particular fragrance. Please use the cultivar name as the title of your post. And please only post descriptions of that one cultivar in that post. If someone has already posted their description of your cultivar, feel free to add your own personal fragrance perceptions as a comment to their post. Everyone experiences fragrance a bit differently and your experience might vary for any number of reasons. Thank you for helping with this project! Randy

This is Katy's story, as told to me and published with her permission; Scented iris bring back memories of my childhood growing up in a home floral, nursery business, and farm in Las Animas, Colorado in the 1950's. Every "Decoration Day", now called "Memorial Day", my parents cut their iris and we five children carried from the field, armloads of iris into our onion storage warehouse. There a team of women created fresh bouquets of iris and peonies with our floral shrubs for fillers. Those iris armloads were heavy, but I loved their floral variety, colors and varied scents as a child! The local elementary school lunch cooks saved gallon and half gallon vegetable cans all year for my mother to cover with pretty and colorful floral foil for complimentary bouquet containers. My parents delivered these floral arrangements to the community cemetery early in the morning after working for the previous twenty-four hours. They had received telegram and phone and letter orders from all over the United States, as the youth who left this small town for distant jobs wanted to honor their deceased ancestors. This was the most prosperous season of their business and I assume that similar floral displays were in every local cemetery in the West. Townspeople congregated in the town cemetery to visit graves and clean the markers and headstones or to listen to the military programs of the VFW or American Legion men. I was saddened when plastic flowers, and then silk flowers became popular in cemeteries, probably in the 1980's and since then.