In this painting, the artist used watercolours to capture the delicacy of the irises, as well as their vivid colour. A lifelong lover of flowers, Blackadder kept a collection of local flowers as a child, each pressed and labelled with their Latin names. Here, she depicts the irises from different angles with the precision of a botanical illustrator. Yet despite her painstaking attention to detail, the flowers look graceful and full of life. Irises were a favourite flower of the artist, and in 1979 she began keeping a sketchbook to document each variety as it appeared in her garden. Around this time, Blackadder was also a frequent visitor to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where she helped to run a course in botanical illustration, which gave her access to rare and exotic plants.