The Iris Project

This has been a banner year for figs and gardenias in our garden, thanks to the past dry warm winter. DH has been eating figs from the trees all summer and put up several jars of preserves besides. Delicious with bagels and cream cheese, or butter and toast. I've been thinking of making a tart with figs if I can get around the yellow jackets and bald-faced hornets that have recently started monopolizing the figs. Yellow Jackets get so aggressive around food sources this time of year.

Our gardenias, quite stingy with flowers in past years, looked like this at the end of May:

The sweet fragrance permeated the entire yard.

At the other end of the spectrum, this year was not a banner year for bearded iris in my garden. Even though I diligently kept the deadnettle off of them all winter and spring they didn't bloom very much. I got maybe a half dozen flowers in the big perennial bed. They were simply too crowded and overshadowed by other plants (four o'clocks, Brazilian Blue Sage, rugosas and Bidens) the rest of the year.

In 2011, Jessie's Song

and Jellybean.
I missed the bouquets of iris flowers this year.

Compare to 2006, when there were far fewer woody plants and overall competition:

By 2010 the iris were mostly relegated to the edges of paths where they could still shine.

This year the garden had matured right up to the paths' edge in many places and so the extra iris went up into a new bed in the front yard.

(There isn't really a daylily planted with the hydrangea in front of the house. That's a
'Spellblinder' that was taken out of the vegetable garden due to some serious clashing with
Phlox 'Robert Poore' and I was waiting for a cooldown to put it elsewhere. There's also a young
Bald Cypress that was rescued from vicious deer antlers and will find a new home this fall.)

So, barring a late freeze, there should be more iris flowers next year. I hope so. Both my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather grew beautiful iris up in limestone country in southern Indiana years ago and I have entranced by them ever since. I should probably mulch the bed with gravel too, since voles took out the iris next to the sidewalk. The soil is much sandier and easier to dig in around the house than in the gardens below, and if it's cold Prissy would prefer to stay in her heated bed on the porch than hunt voles.

In the fall of 2010 I decided to move the path at the back of the big bed, to the very back where the two loblolly pines keep anything I plant from thriving or even living, and this created some temporary open space for iris as well. You can see a little bit of the new planting area mulched with hay in the pictures from 2011 below.

The pictures below are from the spring of 2011. I LOVE iris in mixed plantings like those below but eventually they will all have to have more of their own space, likely close to the house. The gardens below the house just have to become less work. DH is too busy to help with the garden, and there are farm projects to be done and horses to be ridden too.

I keep thinking to myself that I won't be ordering new iris anytime soon, and then I see something like this: a post about Ginny Spoon's gorgeous iris on the blog of the American Iris Society, World of Irises. I was completely smitten with the beautiful shades of rose and plum in those iris. Or Mike Unser's post about black iris. I'm not a fan of black pansies, as they truly are coal black and rather ghoulish (although perfect for Halloween), but I am a big fan of "black" tulips and iris. Black iris are in deep shimmering shades of purple or deep red. There's lots of eye candy on the AIS' facebook page as well.