Great Bearded Iris Experiment

It's a good time to step into the blog posts again after a year off from blogging, as opposed to stepping into the gifts left by dog walkers passing my hell strip garden. As the webmaster and a contributing author of our Master Gardeners public web site, I have had the pleasure(?) of running the monthly time-consuming updates. This year, I hope to return to blogging about my wonderful plants and gaffes as others abandon blogging and turn to Instagram (blogging without narrative).

This is the third year of the Great Bearded Iris Experiment, and the results are beginning to bloom. I crossed several of the six different bearded iris in my gardens with their various sizes, petal form, and colors. I wanted to see what might come of this and just to see if I could do it. I did not record or track which plants were crossed and eventually produced seedlings.

For the past two years, the seven or eight seedlings that actually developed continued to grow and mature. Today, one of those plants is blooming and a few others are sending up stalks with buds. How exciting. From looking at the results of this one, I can deduce it came from Fantasyland and Frank Adams. The petal falls are rounded and flat, similar to the burgundy color of Frank Adams, but with a distinct purple tint of Fantasyland around the edge of the petal. The top petals are non-ruffled beige like Frank Adams but with a little pink -- what one would expect when crossing a beige top and a mostly light colored top.

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Fantasyland		Frank Adams

I can't say the first result will end up as an expensive new introduction in garden catalogs, but I am proud that I accomplished this task successfully. The combination of burgundy with violet is not to my liking, but I will keep an eye on the others that should bloom in the coming weeks.

Next year, I might be sharing results of the Daylily Experiment started last year.