Hello All,
Happy 2019! My name is Judy and I go by wvyen (West Virginian). I just found this site and forum. I am looking forward to learning a lot from it.
A couple years ago I inherited my mother's iris collection. Due to her declining health they were in pretty bad shape then, and worse shape now. I have recently moved back to WV and will now be able to put in the work necessary to try and salvage as many of her varieties as possible. She got her first irises (Wabash and a couple others) when she and my dad bought the place in the 1950s, they came with the property. She added a few in the 70s and 80s and then in the late 1990s started placing regular orders. All told she had over 400 different cultivars at one time or another. I will be pleased if I can salvage a quarter of that number. To date I have recovered about 50. I know that at least a quarter of them were already gone before she passed.
So my goal for this winter is to set up a database to be able to keep good records of what I recover of hers and what I add. My goal for this spring and summer is to get all that I can find dug out of the weed field that they are currently in and get them replanted. My eventual goal is to have a beautiful iris garden and to help with preserving and recovering old varieties. I am fortunate that mom kept good notes and excellent labels. I welcome all help, suggestions and encouragement.

Thanks In Advance
Judy

Welcome, Judy.


The folks here are about as helpful as anyone could wish for, and they are all happy to talk Irises.

Looking forward to seeing the rescue progress.

Welcome to the forum, Judy! It sounds like you've cut your work cut out for you, but what an admirable goal.

Judy,
I wish you all the best growing your mother's irises.

There was a thread about record keeping a while back and Plant Step was recommended
The thread "Spreadsheet or database for irises?" in Irises forum

I would take lots of 'before' pictures, so you can visually see your progress. What an admirable project. Best of luck.

Welcome, and what a great project you have! I'm sure you'll find lots of help here when you need it. These people are the best!

I think you have a real head start with having labels, notes and a good idea of iris names. I wish you the best in your adventure to recover your mom's buried gems. Do post progress reports as we will all be cheering you along.

Thank you all! Here's a couple pictures to give you an idea. Weeds have all but taken over. The small ones are a few I salvaged this spring, I have since lost one of these. . [Pictured: Fragrant Lilac, Honeycomb, Who's A Toff, Dandy Candy, NOID 1] The last is a couple from the house I just moved out of that I brought back with me. Batik in the foreground and Delerium in the background.

Wishing you much success in your endeavors to save yr mother's irises.

Welcome Judy!

Your Mother must have had a great collection of (historic) irises. Once you remove the weeds and start digging, you may be surprised to find more rhizomes than you can currently see.

I wish you the best on your heart felt project. Contact me in the Summer and I'll see if I have anything that was on her list that you want to replace.

Judy ~ to the Irises Forum!
You will find that this group of iris growers to be very helpful, as they have been for me. I am only in my second year of growing an iris collection, and they all have been helpful all along the way. If you stick around here, you will be in good company, as many are quite experienced.

welcome , welcome judy. this is a fun forum to visit. we will cheer you, encourage you, and help you acquire more irises than you might have dreamed possible.😂

hope you stick around for the wonderful blooms that are a few months away.

Welcome to the Iris Forum, Judy!

Judy, good luck with your big project! You'll get lots of help here if you need it.

Judy, to the iris forum. If your mom had two very similar irises and you don't know which is which, I'm sure a lot of us can help you obtain test iris rhizomes also.
Welcome again.

UndertheSun said: Once you remove the weeds and start digging, you may be surprised to find more rhizomes than you can currently see. .

Yes, something that I discovered for myself... irises can sink themselves down, or pull themselves in. (Daylilies can do that, too.)

This last summer I went on a rescue mission for 'Black Phantom'. In the case of 'Black Phantom', I thought that the small remaining patch (which should have been ginormous by now, even with the part shade) was due to gophers. Well, possibly some rhizomes were lost due to gophers, but apparently other rhizomes had just sunk down, and then stalled growth/propagation. After I had pulled out maybe 5 small rhizomes (all that I thought there were, and more than there were at first glance), my garden helper found another 3-4 (he was doing some work in that spot; presumably these are also BP), and now there is another rhizome coming up right next to a sprinkler head there (that one is deep and is definitely BP).

I also dug up most of my 'Busy Being Blue' this summer (no other irises were anywhere near there), and after the fact, I found a few more irises coming up.



In addition to these, some irises which I had planted a couple of years ago (in a freshly dug/made bed area) were definitely sinking down and getting buried. I've rescued two of them thus far, but I have another few to go.

I guess the lesson here is to not just weed, but carefully dig up the soil around your iris patch, and you might find more rhizomes than you first thought.

(Along with that lesson... make sure the soil is fairly firm when you replant, and keep an eye on your iris patch, and make sure that the replanted irises aren't pulling themselves down.)

Hello, Judy! Welcome to the iris forums!

The more you stick around, the more that 50 some irises will turn into 75....and then 100.....and then 200...then 3,000...we call it the iris virus, cuz' we see new irises we hadn't seen before...and then we want that one, and then this one, and that one too......it's a vicious(ly) pretty cycle! Beware!

Good luck with your new irises! Stick around!

to the iris forum and good luck with your iris rescue project!

and good luck with your iris recovery project!