The iris family
Iridaceae is built on the number three. Iris, gladiolus, freesia and crocus all belong to it, and once you have noticed that everything about these flowers comes in threes you cannot stop seeing it. The family also supplies the most expensive spice in the world, from a crocus picked by hand before the sun is properly up.
about 66 genera
roughly 2,200 species
Worldwide, with an extraordinary concentration in South Africa
The flowers carry three outer segments and three inner ones, three stamens, and an ovary divided into three chambers. In an iris the outer three arch downward and are called falls, the inner three stand upright and are called standards, and even the style is split into three petal like arms lying over the falls.
That architecture is a landing system. A bee follows the marked stripe on a fall, pushes under the style arm and is forced past the anther on the way in. Each of the three sections works as a separate entrance, so one flower is effectively three independent traps for pollen.
The leaves are the other signature: flat, sword shaped and arranged in a single plane so the plant forms a fan rather than a tuft. Botanists call them equitant, meaning each leaf straddles the one inside it. A fan of flat leaves under a flower built in threes is this family and very little else.
Gladiolus has a habit that catches out anybody storing it flat. The tip is strongly geotropic, meaning it senses gravity and turns away from it, so a spike left horizontal in a box will bend upward at the end within hours and set that way permanently.
There is no fixing it afterward. Store and transport them upright, and if a box arrives that has been laid down, stand it up immediately rather than after the rest of the delivery is dealt with.
The spike opens from the bottom upward over several days, which is the family's usual pattern and a genuine selling point. Pinching out the top few unopened buds pushes the plant's effort into the ones below and gives a straighter, more even spike, and removing spent lower flowers as they go keeps the whole stem looking deliberate rather than tired.
Most members grow from a corm, which is a solid swollen stem base rather than the layered bulb of a daffodil. A corm is used up entirely in one season and the plant builds a new one on top for the next, which is why gladiolus and freesia are treated as annual plantings in cold climates and lifted rather than left in the ground.
Vase life across the family is moderate, five to ten days. Iris is the shortest, and the individual flower is genuinely brief at a day or two, though a stem carries several in succession. Buy iris in tight pencil bud with just a flash of color showing and it will open in the vase. Buy it open and most of its life is already spent.
Freesia is the scented one, and the scent is the reason to carry it rather than the color. It is also the one member that reliably fills a room without overwhelming it, which makes it useful where hyacinth or tuberose would be far too much.
Saffron is Crocus sativus and it belongs to this family. Each flower yields three red stigmas, the same three part structure showing up again, and they have to be picked by hand at dawn before the flower opens fully. It takes somewhere in the region of 150,000 flowers to make a kilogram, which is why it costs what it does.
Orris root is another commercial product from this family, taken from the rhizome of certain irises and aged for years before use. It smells of violets and is one of the most important fixatives in perfumery, the ingredient that makes other scents last on skin.
The fleur de lis is a stylized iris and has been a royal emblem in France for the better part of a thousand years. The genus is named for Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow and messenger between gods and people, which is a fair description of a genus that comes in almost every color there is.
