Please can someone explain to me the acronym PBF. I love irises, have some old cultivars with their names lost in time, I'm trying to identify these however I stumble with with/without PBF... ( ?). I belong to the uncouth irisarians willing to learn... Arturo

Hi Arturo, good to see you on the iris thread. It's not nice of us to use these abbreviations without an explanation. But we get too lazy to type out all the words. I think Texting is making things worse! PBF stands for Purple Based Foliage. Some irises have purple coloring at the base of the leaves. Some have a lot, others have a small amount, and still others have none at all. Some have purple that shows on the stems of the bloom stalks and some have purple on the bloom spathe.
I don't have a good picture of PBF, but here's a picture of a purple spathe on the iris Dialect. You can see a tiny bit of PBF on one leaf though. Wish I had a better picture.
I'm sure some one will have some to add.

Thank you so much Tom; it took me quite some time before I ventured to ask.( I recognize I'm a fool)... however I wonder how many newcomers are faced with permanent "new dialect" deciphering in the extensive world of gardening. Perhaps a kind of permanent lexicon associated with the forum of the species could help. I strongly advise anything that can make gardening a challenge for larger numbers throughout the world...which undoubtedly helps for a much more peaceful and amicable world... a lexicon explaining properties of irises,plants and their flowers, and all the necessary acronyms used in the "trade" to facilitate comunication. If the proposal, is accepted then we could go ahead designing this lexicon. I could perhaps contribute. Arturo

Hi Arturo! to the Iris forum -- glad you joined us!

Hello Tarak, and welcome to the irises forum. That was a great question too. When I was very young I was given an iris that was marked white unk. I looked for that name for a long time before someone told me that unk stood for unknown. So, by today's terminology I was looking for a NoID or a No Identification iris. LOL I had to laugh at the time I had wasted looking for white unk.

Hi, Arturo. More views of purple-based foliage.

Too funny Bonnie!

Arturo, this link from Winterberry Gardens is a very nice place to start with many of the terms and abbreviations. It's pretty thorough.
http://www.winterberryirises.c...

Hope you find it helpful.

Bonnie --

Deb -- those are some mighty fine looking rhizomes!!

Mary Ann, those are Before and After photographs of NOID yellow rhizomes I sent to Arlyn a couple of years back. He is helping me identify them. Couldn't bring myself to discard any and I knew he had some room, so...

Thank you all. I discovered that some of my multiple Noids irises are PBF! Now that is a major achievement! Arturo P.S Tom your link was particularly useful Thank you for your trouble!

No trouble at all, we're here to enable!

[quote="hampartsum"]it took me quite some time before I ventured to ask.
Arturo,
I think there has been a lot of us that have followed this forum before we joined in. Glad to have you here and again!

!! here's a link to a short article about PBF, and, if you look around the site, there are many useful articles on both culture, and the ID process. http://www.historiciris.org/ar...

Welcome Arturo. Enjoy the group. Most don't have a keyboard to give some special characters or accents-like ñ, so please excuse any "errors" in our posts.
Arlyn, the NOid Jake you sent me shows PBF! Several others do this late in season also.

I'll have to take the shovel out, and check mine !! So far, I've never seen any, here . Even on the 'supposed to REALLY be ,Jake"! I fell WAY behind on my PBF "observations', this year , I was trying for "weekly" checks.......and ended up with "monthly" (almost)

Arturo

I am glad you asked that question because I didn't know what it meant either.

Now with daylilies we use the term red socks to indicate foilage at the base has some red coloring to it.

And now I'VE learned something new -- thank you Cindy!!! These forums are great for an ongoing education!!

You are quite welcome Mary Ann

Arturo.