Sure, Brett
For starters, the form on 06f leaves a lot to be desired. The standards are a bit loose. Open standards are not necessarily a bad thing, but if an iris is going to have open standards they need to be ramrod stiff and the style arms ought to provide something interesting to look at. The style arms in this iris were just plain white. While the flower is ruffled to a degree, it lacks the type of deep ruffling I look for. Proportionally, the falls are a little too short. It almost looks like someone trimmed the edges and stole my ruffles in the process (what a dastardly deed!
) The orange beard is a problem. Orange beards can provide a lot of visual appeal to blue(ish) irises. But, in this case, shades of blue and orange didn't go well together and it ended up having a jarring effect. It was actually hard for me to look at for very long in the garden. I usually just took a quick picture and moved on. That's not a good sign because I'm capable of sitting and staring at irises for loooong periods of time. The patterning on the falls is interesting, but there needs to be more contrast between the colors (or less, the texture veining on several of the other seedlings is more subtle, but also more pleasing to the eye).
You never know, though, maiden blooms don't always provide the full picture of what an iris is going to be. Maybe next year's bloom will knock my socks off. If not, it's toast.
09e is a little harder to describe. The falls are a bit out of proportion again although it's not nearly as noticeable as in 09f. The ruffling is not bad, but nothing special either. The big problem with 09e is its color. I don't know if it comes through in the pictures or not, the falls of 09e are similar to those of 09a, but they lack its depth of color. They're just kind of dull. The standards of 09e are a warm creamy pale pink, very similar to those of 09c. That color works on 09c because its falls are a warm shade of red-violet. It doesn't work on 09e. To put it the way my wife would describe it, 09a is a "cool" and 09c is a "warm". 09e is a sort of a combination of the two but ends up being a somewhat muddy combination.
Here is another picture of 09c that might help illustrate the point. The flower was a little beaten up from the weather but this picture shows its color really well.
11T-09c
Those creamy pink standards contrast really nicely with the color of the falls. Not so much with 09e's falls.
All of the Dinner Talk children are still in the seedling beds. I just didn't have the heart to throw them away, even the ugly ones. They'll have to be winnowed down some next year, though.
