Kelly Norris - A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts

A Guide to Bearded Irises

CULTIVATING THE RAINBOW FOR BEGINNERS AND ENTHUSIASTS

Kelly D. Norris

To make me fantastic, I have to be Rainbow High/In magical colors

Rainbow High,
Evita (1976)

I love irises all kinds, really. But Im head-over-heels crazy for bearded irises. I guess it all started in 1999 at the kitchen table of Cal Reuter, a well-known irisarian from Wisner, Nebraska. Irisarian thats the proper terminology for someone crazier about irises than a normal person would think healthy. Im one, and Id venture a guess that if you arent one already, you will be, by books end. I was all of 12 the summer I sat at Cals kitchen table, poring through his small-type catalog in search of what I didnt know would become an all-consuming passion. I walked away with ten cultivars that day, vowing to keep track of their names as a promise to Cal. He dug them from his expansive front-yard field, marked them, and sent them home with me in a box that got stuffed under the backseat of my grandmas van. I remember feeling giddy about the whole excursion, and as we ambled down the dusty road, away from Cals Spruce Gardens, I checked over the seat to see that my box of plants was riding snugly, as the trees at the edge of Cals property faded in the distance.

Fast forward three years. In that short span of time, those ten irises cultivated something deeper in me than I did in them. My collection had grown to almost 350 varieties by the summer of 2002, when I sent an email to a man named Cliff Snyder, who at the time owned Rainbow Iris Farm in Bartlett, Texas. Though I had no idea then, my life changed on 30 July 2002.

Rainbow High (Keppel 2009)

To make a long story short, I (a mere 15-year-old) talked my parents into flying to Texas, buying, and subsequently relocating Rainbow Iris Farm to our farm in rural Bedford, Iowa. We tilled up seven acres, spent 320-plus man-hours planting 40,000 rhizomes, and watched a former cattle pasture grow into a field of dreams. We opened for business on 18 May 2003 and havent looked back, except to chuckle at our craziness, since.

With this book, I feel like Im telling an epic story about how to grow and love magically colored bearded irises, complete with a dashing cast of characters, a rich historical backdrop, and an optimistic and enterprising protagonist you. This is a book for iris lovers plant lovers of a special kind who seek out rhizome sales like garage sales, track the comings and goings of bearded irises with unabashed addiction, and approach color-laden standards, falls, and beards without fear. If youre holding this book, youre an iris lover already, or one in eager training. I hope reading it will be like having a dirt-inspired conversation over a cuppa or a flute of bubbling Moscato. And heres full disclosure: I hope to cultivate nothing less than an all-out obsession in you by the time you close its cover.

More than ever in the 21st century, gardeners demand that their gardens look and feel like them, with plants that express their character and sense of style. Gardens should teem with our favorite plants. Mine teems with bearded irises, and with any luck yours does (or will) too. Bearded irises are a part of our horticultural heritage, grown throughout the world for a millennium and revered for their inarguable place of honor at the colorful table that is spring. From humble beginnings in the wilds of the Caucasus and central Europe, these flags evolved into banners of that season, thanks to the efforts of hybridizers from the 1840s to the present. Theyre timeless, classic perennials. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and next-door neighbors brought bearded irises into the lives of a new generation, decade on decade, sharing their passion for the rainbow with every twinkly-eyed neophyte that strolled past on a mid-May afternoon. In that way bearded irises are beatnik passalongs, entering gardens more often through the back gate in a paper grocery bag than through the front in a black plastic pot.

The diversity of bearded irises rivals that of any herbaceous perennial we can grow in temperate climates, sporting nearly all colors of the rainbow and innumerable permutations and variations thereof. With such a banquet of cultivars and types to relish, ). After well over a decade of growing and loving bearded irises, I hardly lack for an opinion!

Jesses Song (Williamson 1983) at Rainbow Iris Farm

Sitting in front of my bookshelves, looking at my nearly complete collection of the Bulletin of the American Iris Society from 1920 through the present, Im daunted by the legions of passionate iris soldiers that have gone before me breeding, writing, lecturing, judging, and exhibiting for decades before I was even born. Though a little overwhelmed by the magnitude and depth of inquiry possessed in these tomes, Ive found relief in one unifying idea their body of work exists because of an undying love for the genus Iris. Ive taken it as a rallying cry to translate that love into words and images in this volume, which I hope will keep a special place on shelves next to works probably wiser than mine.

Much of the bearded iris story has to do with passionate gardeners who swapped pollen through the mail, gathered in the lobbies of malls to exhibit flowers, and drove to little country churches to talk to garden clubs. Many works on the genus Iris have focused on these characters. With all respect, I choose instead to write more about their plants, which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from J. Marion Shulls excellent Rainbow Fragments (1931):

But all of these workers, mostly still in the prime of life and many of them with splendid new varieties to their credit, to single out any one for special mention would be invidious, and so their work must be left to speak for them, with the next generation of garden lovers, of Iris enthusiasts, to sit in judgment on their comparative merits.

Bearded irises are staple perennials, sure. But generations of gardeners in search of springtime doers planted undownable bearded irises, sometimes along the back fence and nearly forgotten, or in the dooryard and kindly treasured, in a simple quest for May beauty. Thankfully for us, those dooryard and back fence irises evolved into a deeper obsession for many a horticultural quest for more of that satisfying color that only irises do so well. Playing as kids in these dooryards, some of us touched an iris for the first time, pulled gently at its silky petals for a closer sniff, and then giggled with delight. Why are bearded irises so special? Im eager to share everything I know in answer to that question. Well tour and Ill teach, and after its all through, you might say that weve been on a rainbow high.