Growing Bearded Iris

I've been holding off on sharing pictures of the iris here at Seven Oaks until the last one, the peach colored one I bought last year, blooms.  Yet the weather prediction is for three solid days of rain - maybe even five - with thunderstorms predicted, and you know what that means. Iris petals on the ground rather than on the flower, I think.  I'm heading out now with my camera to get some pictures of the garden before the rains come, but in the meantime I thought I'd just go ahead and share photos of the garden plus a link to my latest gardening article on Main Line Gardening on Growing Iris.  Someday I need to take pictures of the embankments along these back country roads. Some of them are just a sea of iris at this time of year, the most incredible sight I have seen next to big pools of daffodils blooming near old barns. It's amazing how some flowers thrive on neglect and I think iris is one of those. Baby them too much, they shrivel up and die. Plant them along an embankment on a back country road and forget about them, and years later you've got a massive display of flowers every May. Go figure!

Most of my iris are gifts from my neighbor, Joan.  The purple and white is the infamous iris from my in-laws garden in Huntington, the one I tell everyone smells like grape Nehi soda.  The peach one I bought last year at a garden center in Lynchburg; I have two, Cloud and Cherub, who have gone three years without blooming and need to be moved, pronto.  The others blooming now are gifts from Joan's garden, a deep purple, a yellow and the white-faded-denim colored iris.

Enjoy!

From Joan's garden, two iris blooming now: yellow, above, and below, one the color of bleached denim.