First posted online in February 2018, the Cultivar Database is a merger of two projects. The older of the two is CHECK LIST OF PACIFIC COAST NATIVE IRIS CULTIVARS AND SPECIES, a paper document originally edited by Ed Pasahow and first published by the Society in 1974. The second project started 30 years later when the Society decided to create a collection of digital images of Pacific Coast Irises. Richard Richards, the president at the time, recruited Ken Walker to develop this collection. Within a couple of years Ken had also taken over the Checklist. After maintaining the Checklist and publishing it for several years, Ken decided to use photos from the growing collection to transform the old Checklist into an Illustrated Checklist. That work was eventually completed, although the Illustrated Checklist was never distributed as such. The Checklist document contains a number of sections that had not been updated for many years and Ken hoped to remedy that before distributing the new version. Unfortunately the updates were not all easy.
One section listed cultivars that were most often used in breeding along with how often they were used by the originator of the cultivar and how often they were used by other hybridizers. The checklist was now large enough that analyzing all the pedigrees by hand was not something that appealed to a software engineer like Ken. Most of the pedigrees are nicely structured and should be amenable to analysis by a computer program; when a pedigree contains general English text, putting quotes around the text would allow the program to treat this text as something it doesn’t need to understand.
Ken found the project to automatically analyze pedigrees challenging enough to be fun – much more fun than manually analyzing them. Well over half the pedigrees could be analyzed as-is and most of the rest just needed some judicious quotes. With the pedigrees cleaned up, Ken experimented with producing various flavors of cultivar descendant analysis – a distraction from creating the simpler table in the Checklist. Continuing the trend of distraction, Ken realized that he should be able to use pedigree analysis to produce a nice web-based display of each pedigree (the more complex pedigrees are almost unreadable in simple text form). The result of this sub-project is seen in the Cultivar Database.
By this time, some years have passed since the Illustrated Checklist project had been started; Bob Seaman was now the SPCNI web master and making large improvements to the web site. The decision was made to put the Checklist on line. Bob favored converting the Checklist into a true database, so Ken undertook that project. For various reasons, it was some years before this was completed and incorporated in to the SPCNI web site.
You can access the Cultivar Database from the Resources menu above or by clicking here.
The database is missing photos for many cultivars. If you have a photo of one of these irises, please help us improve the database by sending us the photo. Ideal photos are at least 600 pixels on a side after being cropped to a single bloom, but smaller images are still helpful. We are very happy to receive images that are much larger than 600x600 pixels and are uncropped. We’ll add them to our general photo collection, then crop and resize them for the database. Several cultivar photos are of only modest quality; if you have a high quality photo, we can also use it to replace the current one.
Licensing: by sending us a photo you agree to give the SPCNI an unlimited, non-exclusive license to use and distribute the photo. In plain English: we are allowed to do what we want with the photo and you continue to be allowed to do what you want with it.
When you send us a photo, we need the name of the photographer, which we will track. We can also track where the photo was taken if you know that. We cannot track different license agreements for each photo. Only send us photos for which the photographer agrees to the license that we require (you can send us photos from a deceased photographer, if you are confident that the heirs are ok with it). Note, if we share a photo with someone else, we’ll give the recipient the photographer’s name but cannot control how they use or caption the photo.
To contribute photos or suggest corrections to the database data, please contact Ken Walker at kenww001@astound.net.