Also not helping: the Irish-Catholic genes to which I owed my translucently pale, vein-laced skin.
Visitors to the gardens can learn more luscious vocabulary: a plicata iris has light-colored flowers stippled, dotted or stitched with a darker color, while a luminata variety has pale veins.
The leaves, which are all basal, are similar to those of Galax (Galax urceolata) but smaller, with pale veins and wavy margins, and without basal lobes.
Leaves alternate, petioles 2.5 4 cm long, 0.4 cm across; stipules triangular, margin fimbriate; leaf blade nearly symmetric, cordate, 3.5 8 cm long, 3 7.5 cm wide, chartaceous, adaxial surface green, slightly bullate, hirtellous, venation dark green and impressed, iridescent; leaf abaxial surface pale, veins reddish or red, manifestly elevated and hirtellous, margin irregularly double-serrate.
So, for example, turbot stuffed with a pale green vein of leek mousse has to be fished out with two spoons and dropped unsteadily upon a bowl of summer beans.
Pale blue veins stand out like spidery tracings.
Flower: sepals 2, +- 1/2 × corolla, +- round, 3--12 mm, margin gland-toothed; petals 5--7, 6--9 mm, obovate, white to pale pink, veins 5--7, tip rounded; stamens 5--6; stigmas 3. Fruit: +- 3 mm.
Nine cycles of decellularization with 1% Triton and 1% tri- n-butyl phosphate resulted in generation of pale and translucent veins (Supplement Fig. S1A, DV).
I moved around the bed, stopping in amazement to see Grandmother's caladiums -- angel wings to her -- transformed from the old traditional wine red with crimson veining to pale creamy green leaves with little flecks and streaks of blood red.
The terminology says it all: "blue blood", from the Spanish sagre azul, coined in the late 1500s to distinguish between the racially superior white Christian nobility (with pale skin revealing blue veins) and the Jews, Muslims and West Africans whom Europeans were increasingly ousting from their continent.
Leaves peltate; petiole terete, 5 21 cm long, 0.2-0.5 cm across, green, nearly glabrous; leaf blade asymmetric, ovate, (4.5- 6.2-13 -14.8) cm long, (3- 5-8 -9.7) cm wide, apex acuminate, subcoriaceous, abaxially pale green or red, veins red and puberulous, adaxially green and glabrous.
