Planting Bearded Irises

 My Bearded Irises arrived yesterday and I planted them out today.  In the rain.  When you wait for months for a plant, it doesn't matter what the weather is when it arrives.  Bearded irises always arrive cut back and bare root.  I don't want them hanging around in a box any longer than necessary, but it is still delayed gratification because you order them in April, they arrive in August, and they don't bloom until next May or June anyway!

I have had Bearded Irises before.  I think the few that I still have here and there were ordered 20 years ago.  They are not in the best locations, they have been swallowed up by other landscape and they rarely bloom.  In fact, the nicest one got left behind at the neighbor's house back when my husband used to live there.  I still get to enjoy it as I have visitation rights!

 When I was thinking of some sort of colorful plant for this landscape bed, I thought - "well, Bearded Iris would probably stand the deer pressure."  A little pepper spray should be all that is needed to discourage them.  And it is a good environment for irises.  They can handle shallow, well drained (let's face it, it's dry) soil with not much mulch.  We blow leaves across this bed in the fall so I needed something that can take the abuse.  A cut back Iris that doesn't need deep mulch will be a perfect compliment to the rugged, ornamental grasses.  And they will provide some interest in the early summer before the grasses grow tall.

Dodging raindrops I went out with my auger and prepared enough holes.

I had already ordered and sorted the varieties with a particular layout in mind and had been tweaking a spreadsheet for months.  I took into account the mature height of each, as well as their bloom season.  I want the tallest ones in the back of course.

I ordered 16 varieties representing a wide range of colors. That is the nice thing about iris.  They do have a pretty good color pallet.  Red and Orange are poorly represented, but they have just about every other shade.  Ironically, my least favorite iris colors are any purple and yellow combinations that end up looking muddy brown to my eye.  And that seems to be their most natural color combo.

Bleh.

Irises are rhizomes which sit at the surface of the soil.  They do not like to be buried too deeply.  That makes it a little tricky to get them securely placed.  Until they start to root in, they can easily be kicked over, pulled up, or otherwise molested by wildlife and general weather and traffic, so I pinned a wire cloche over each of them.  These will probably stay in place until after leaf blowing season, at which point I will need to reassign the cloches to the Primroses for the winter.

I just don't know what I would do without these cloches.  I always seem to have a use for them.  Now - we wait.