>Fer over at My Little Garden in Japan is hosting a “blog carnival” today:
Show us the best of your garden, your favorite flower, vegetable, bush, tree, cactus, shrub, herb, moss, algae, fern, fruit, root, creeper, climber, grass, weed, bulb or any other plant you love (or more than one if you prefer).
I’ll give it a go, and will pass on the request to spend a little time ranting about your favorite plants.
Well, as the title indicates I want to tell you a bit about my iris, a family of plants that I really love. I find them so utterly graceful with their shard-like leaves and exotic-looking and exuberant flowers.
Sadly this is the only picture of a flowering iris I have for this post. The yellow iris pseudacorus down by the little stream. Native to Europe, this wetland iris has leave up to a meter in height and the flower stems typically reach 1.5 meters. When we bought the summer house, they were already growing behind the annex, and this does seem to be it’s natural habitat so it will remain there, combining with the tall reeds to make a sort of screen towards the neighbours on the other side of the stream.
Iris Germanica is one of the plants that was rescued from the bulldozers back in September. The rhizomes were put in a temporary bed for the winter, but hopefully they will be moved in early spring once the last frost is off the ground and maybe if I’m lucky it will bloom the first summer. Time will tell.
Like the iris pseudacorus, this is a rather large and perhaps slightly coarse iris, but this one is dark blue and seems to thrive more in regular garden soil, rather than in the somewhat boggy habitat of the pseudacorus.
Iris hollandica, a cultivated bulbous iris, currently only lives in a bag in the workshop in the annex. They should really go into a piece of well-drained soil (which in my garden means a pot), but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I’m thinking it might end up in the same pot as the gladiolus callianthus in the courtyard. Both are not completely hardy, so this means I can put out the pot once frost is gone, enjoy the iris hollandica in late spring/early summer and the Abyssinian gladiolus in late summer. As the foliage is quite similar for both plants, it should make for a harmonious cohabitation.
This is Iris sanguinea in situ in my parents’ garden before I divided it and replanted most, bringing two root clumps with me for our garden. I’m not sure why this species got it’s bloody name, but it’s one of those plants that I grew up with in my parents’ garden, and it forms wonderfully big clumps of intertwined roots that needs to be divided every so often in order to keep it blooming at its maximum.
It has been put in a temporary position until I can plant it out in the yet-nonexistent Ambitious Border, where I hope it will be able to make an impact already next summer.
As a small aside, can I just mention how amazing it is to have dived head-first into an international garden blogging community? It seems that this blog mainly has US readers, but according to Blogspot Stats there are also readers from India, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Australia and many more countries around the world. And now this entry is sparked by an entry in a blog about balcony gardening in Japan… I look forward to continuing this world-tour of gardens via the internet!
(Entry title is borrowed from the poem Iris, Most Beautiful Flower by Edith Buckner Edwards.)