About the Iris Conjuration and its Ancestors

It would be nice to have an iris database. There is one, namely the collection of Iris Check Lists published by the American Iris Society. But they're in printed form. I'd like to see an on-line database which would access the information in these lists when you give the name of an iris.

Since Conjuration was the leading A.I.S. Award of Merit winner in the Tall Bearded category of 1994, I thought it would make a good sample request. Suppose you asked this hypothetical database to give information on Conjuration. It could certainly respond with its checklist entry which looks like this:

CONJURATION.  (M. Byers, R. 1988).  Sdlg. D1-1. TB, 36" (91 cm), M-L.
S. white, edge lightly infused pale violet blue; F. white, suffusing 
to deep bright amethyst violet edge; white beard tipped tangerine; 
fuzzy white horns; ruffled.  B-37-10: (Sky Hooks x Condottiere) X
Alpine Castle.  Moonshine Gardens 1989.

It could also check through a list of awards and report those received by Conjuration. But I'd like more. A picture would be nice, if one's available, information on its ancestry, and loads of hypertext links. I've made up a sample of what I'd like to see output by the database program and distributed to the web. It, along with this introduction, is in a separate file. It's quite large, over 180K bytes, but if you are interested, click here.

(In 1998, a couple of years after this file was first created in 1995, Conjuration received the American Dykes Medal, the highest award given by the American Iris Society.)

Notes

Conjuration was bred by the late Monty Byers of California, and it has an unusual combination of qualities. It is white with a violet blue edging (coming from its pollen parent Alpine Castle), a tangerine beard (a recessive quality of Alpine Castle and one grandparent Condottiere and carried by its other grandparent Sky Hooks), and a horn (a partially dominant feature that it gets from Sky Hooks).

I've used some colored icons to indicate this special information. In particular, I've used *horned* to indicate that the iris is horned or spooned. If you follow the along the ancestry, you can see exactly where Conjuration gets its genes for horniness. Similarly, I've added *tangerine* to indicate that the iris has a tangerine or pink beard. I used *bitone* to indicate that the iris carries the dominant bitone or amoena gene passed down from Cook's Progenitor. Since I wasn't sure about some irises, some of these indicators may be missing.

A couple of other indicators that I thought would be useful are *tetraploid* to indicate an iris is tetraploid, and *diploid* to indicate an iris is diploid. Since nearly all modern tall bearded irises are tetraploid, I've only included these for (1) diploids, (2) all species, and (3) when an iris is tetraploid, but one of its parents or other recent ancestors is diploid. Another indicator is *plicata* which indicates the iris is a plicata. For ancestors of other irises, that might be important, but only a few early ancestors of Conjuration were plicatas.