ode to iris

Irises are among my favorite plants. In Texas, the smaller ones, singular in colors of purple, white or yellow, are sometimes called flags. We always had plenty of them in my mother's garden, and they endured without a lot of watering, taking heat and abuse, giving a mass of color during blooming.

The flowers are stunningly beautiful, and on the bearded iris, complex and unlike most other flowers. The iris flower has three standard petals on top, and three drooping petals, or falls, on bottom. One flower stalk may have multiple flowers, making them top heavy. I often stake them so they don't fall over. This is particularly true if you are pushing the sunlight demands just a little. As one flower fades away, I deadhead the old bloom, keeping the stalk tidy so that eyes look at the glory of the newly opened bloom.

I cannot imagine having a garden without some type of iris within its beds. Here in Indy, I have three clumps: a Siberian iris that puts out a white and purple flower, as well as white bearded irises that are repeaters (more on this later).

And a smaller bearded iris that I've only seen in Indy, a violet and yellow mix that strikes me as being some earlier, old fashioned cultivar. I've seen it in a couple of older gardens here. I found it in the edge of the yard, in a very shady area. The leaves were very tiny, and I had missed seeing it the during the first year, when I didn't garden, in part to grieve over leaving my garden in DC, and more importantly, to try and get some handle on gardening in zone 5 in the midwest, and to see what plants I actually had.

When I finally found it, I dug up the rhizomes, the yam or tuber like roots that store up the food for the plant, and in which the flower begins forming long before it shoots out on its stalk, so proud and regally, and I put it in a sunnier spot, and then decided to let it build itself up. Disturb an iris and you can often lose a bloom the next year. But given the years of neglect in a shady spot, this plant needed a recovery period.

That's why it is important to divide them shortly after they bloom -- the conventional wisdom is to do this in late summer. In dividing them, I cut the old, dead parts of the rhizome off, looking for a crown with leaves. I cut the foilage back to about three or four inches. After I divide them, I soak them in a water solution -- they like the same kind of food as tomatoes, so it's easy to remember what kind of fertilizer to use. After a good soaking, I re-plant them. Rhizomes should not be completely buried, only the bottom half. The temptation is is to bury them all, but irises don't like that. Plant them in a place where they get at least six hours of sun, where the soil drains well, and then leave them alone.

Bearded irises should be divided every 3-4 years, but the repeaters need division every 2-3 years due to their being more prolific growth and expansion.

A few years ago, when I started my Indy garden, I bought some packaged rhizomes at a big box hardware store -- they were supposed to be pink flowers -- and planted them in my well-head bed where the spectacular tulips are. And then I forgot about them, which is often an appropriate response to planting irises.

The flowers are its ecstasy, a gift of beauty that stays in the garden, and by its nature it doesn't lend itself to being a cut flower (unlike the Dutch iris, a spring bulb). But it is the architectural nature of the leaves that I admire most, spiked vertical leaves slash sideways and upward about a foot or two, with grayish green colors, a wonderful contrast to all the other plants. And unlike other kinds of plants, like the century plant, it sits well in the border with other plants as well as en masse by itself.

I have a terrible personal dislike of century plants and yuccas, particularly in gardens that are not in a desert like area. I am sure some good folk make them work, but they defy my ability to imagine them as good choices.

Another dislike. Recently I've seen varigated irises, a silly and perhaps sinful need to re-manufacture a wonderful plant to fit the latest scheme. Silly, because this wonderful statement of a slashing leaf becomes one half striped white, an off-white, and one half striped green, a pale green. It doesn't stir you, it only makes you mutter, why?

But enough of my biases. There is a pest problem. I've had good luck, but Barbara Damrosch suggests dipping the roots in a ten-to-one chlorine solution when dividing them. Keep dead stuff away from the plants, giving them air, and of course, don't bury the rhizome entirely.

The late Henry Mitchell, who wrote about gardens for the Washington Post, wrote that that each flower on the stalk is only good for about two days. In his collection, One Man's Garden, he wrote:

One year I took off two weeks during the peak of my irises, and for some odd reason the weather was flawless and the irises were having one of those exceptional years and I sat there and strolled there morning to night for two weeks. There were two thousand stalks of flowers, with about seven flowers on a stalk, and not one of them opened that I did not see in full head-on focus.

He believed that one should pay homage to great flowers, and not just see them "in passing."

The painter Georgia O'Keefe would have agreed with Mitchell. She once said that the reason she painted flowers so large is because people never take the time to stop and look at them, to admire them because we are too busy.