Resilient Beautiful Iris

I have to say that iris are one of my most treasured flowers in the garden. As I've mentioned in past years, I inherited most of my iris from my dear mom after she passed away. I dug up as many iris as I could find in her garden and brought them home. They did well the first couple of years, but then disaster struck and it seemed I was losing them all to some kind of rot. I finally transplanted all of them in 2015, and now, two years later they are blooming again. They looked spectacular!!

This one was transplanted by the squirrels I think. It's a favourite of mine and a very muted purple, which is almost a dove grey. It came up beside the patio. I'll move it in August to a better location because right now it's struggling underneath my black currant bush.

The rest of the iris bloomed in the front garden. We've had quite a nice show for the past two weeks, but now they are all finished.

In the foreground is a Korean lilac which smells amazing! The iris looked so pretty together with the delicate blooms of the lilac. I had to trim the lilac back a bit so it didn't rip into the iris stalks.

This next iris was one of my mom's absolute favourites ... a black iris. I don't know the official name, but she loved the frilled petals and the near black of the deep purple. I had four plants blooming, and each one was a slightly different shade of deep purple.

These soft purple iris have been in the front garden for a few years, they were not transplanted from the back with the rest of them.

Even though I transplanted all the iris I could find two years ago, this year I discovered twenty small iris still coming up in the back garden! They were looking so rough and they were definitely not going to flower this year, so I moved them into the front now rather than wait until the suggested August date. Some of them looked really pathetic!

The smaller plants in front (below) are some of the newly transplanted plants.

I'm not in the least worried if these much smaller iris will survive. Why? Because this is how the rest of the iris looked two years ago when I was in tears thinking I'd lost the lot of them ... 

August 2015

Seriously, if you saw these meager stocks, would you have believed they would survive?!

August 2015

August 2015

But they did, and this gardener couldn't be happier :)

June 2017

There are a few iris that did not bloom this year, and these were the iris I purchased two years ago. I think it may be because their corms got covered with dirt and bark nuggets from all the rain we've had this spring. Also I should have split the corms in August each year, and I neglected to do that. I wrote a post about the care iris need to do their best here if you're interested.