A friend visited my garden a few weeks ago and brought a small iris as a gift. The label says Iris ??eustriense. The question marks are unintelligible letters. He told me it had relatively modest flowers, but beyond that, nothing. I've tried google, but so far I've not had any success in identifying what the species might be. Any ideas?
Peter, I think there is more wrong with the name than just the ilegible first two characters. My key source for published plant names is IPNI.ORG. It works great to do searches with "wildcard" characters. So, it comes up high and dry with a search on Iris *eustriense, confirming the name is more garbled than just the first two letters. Did a search on Iris *iense; no results, indicating that the species ending is wrong. Did a search on Iris *iensis, and I get the following (a few names omitted from this post, as they are unlikely candidates):
daliensis, iliensis, nursairiensis, olbiensis, pariensis, and urmiensis. The last one, is a synonym of Iris barnumiae f. urmiensis.
Note, the IPNI.ORG site lists all botanical names ever published (there are rare omissions) and when searching for all Iris species names, there are 1,336 name combinations. The fact nothing close remembling the given "*eustriense" portion comes up for the genus Iris, tells us the name is more garbled than imagined. People sometimes write plant labels from memory and get the names mixed up. Maybe next year, post a photo of the plant in flower, to get a better idea of a positive ID.