I hope it's okay to show the link here to the American Iris Society's results of their annual tall bearded symposium's popularity poll. I have looked, and see no signs of anyone posting it here yet. The results for the 2017 polling have been up for several weeks on their web page at
https://www.irises.org/About_I... . You can see the link "Results of the 2017 Symposium Voting" toward the very top of that page. Clicking on it dowloads a .pdf document of the results, openable by any app ( such as Adobe Reader) that can open .pdf files. I keep my copy on my device for easy referral, because I find it invaluable for deciding what to buy for my postage stamp yard. I have no space to waste on unproven cultivars. I envy this of you with enough space to be more adventurous in your selections.
I love this year's format, because not only does it show this years ranking of each of the "top 100" irises, but it also shows what rank the same iris occupied in the 2016 poll. That makes it easy to assess which ones are zooming up in the rankings, and which ones are falling. You'll see there are some that were not on the list at all last time, that this time have already zoomed halfway up the list. The dates they were first introduced or registered are also shown, so it's easy to come to a conclusion as to which are "tried and true" versus "passing fads". Also you can tell which new ones are so highly regarded that they are taking off fast! It's also interesting to see how certain ones introduced in the late 1980's that were high on the list in the '90s, and then fell somewhat, are rising again on the list. They are turning out to be more than just passing fancies.
Ones that were on the list last time but have now fallen off the list are also listed at the bottom of the document.
I hope you will enjoy perusing this list as much as I always do. I look forward to the results every year because I find it most fascinating. Team this with searches in the garden.org iris database to see what the various cultivars look like, and you can learn a whole lot about great irises.
