[quote="ARUBA1334"] Lynn..
I am assuming your weather conditions are similar to mine in NY and some plants that are incredible on the west coast will not look the same in your garden the weather will affect things differently .
Yes, you are correct about the climate similarities. The freeze/thaw dynamic and heavy rain are features here. It's interesting to learn that the flowers I love as a matter of aesthetics (the Ghio form) also have environmental advantages. I am from California, so I know the weather differences so well.
Thanks for shedding light on another thing that has also puzzled me. I have spent countless hours studying pictures in the database, especially when one iris has a lot of pictures taken by many different people. Going beyond the differences caused by digital cameras in color rendition, I also noticed that the form sometimes varied from garden to garden - something the vagaries of cameras would not cause. I wondered if I was crazy to think that as no one seemed to comment on it, but it made a marked impression especially when it was pictures of an iris that also grows in my garden. My climate is milder than yours - where I live is a microclimate that enables us to be a producer of wine grapes. Because of the lakes, a matter of a few hundred yards can make a two-week difference in development, especially noticeable in vegetable gardening as there is literally a line where the power of the lakes to kick one up half a zone wanes. I live on the sweet side of the line. But like you, our weather here varies widely not only within each bloom season, but from year to year.
In the past couple of years I started making notes as to when the first flower opens. My initial motivation was that I began selling bouquets at the farm market and I wanted to get a sense of when I'd have something to sell and what color combos there'd be from week to week. Much to my surprise tho, I learned that the weather from year to year did not change the day of first opening in any meaningful way, though it did seem to effect the profusion of blooms and the size/shape of the flowers, so in that way iris have "vintage" like grapes.
In my small yard, surrounded by buildings and trees that cast shadows, location and morning versus after sun, direction of the exposure make a difference in the same iris by as much as 2 weeks. I learned this as a by-product my borer nightmare. I had to dig everything up all at once and plants did not necessarily go back in the beds where they had been. I also realized that in calculating whether a location has enough sun, or whether it will be blocked by shadow really changes by time of year, as the direction/angle of the sun change through the year, and that I had to measure that during the bloom season, because that was when it counted. You have the ideal open field, as do the growers, so they may never experience these variations.
I also learned that some iris are very finicky about everything (sun, soil moisture, drainage and perhaps other soil factors) and others are more tolerant. One iris that excels everywhere in my yard, without fail, is Wintry Sky. Montmartre on the other hand is a finicky creature, but when it gets the right spot it is everything one could wish for. I have found Ghios iris to be difficult, though not every cultivar. They are susceptible when it comes to drainage, and can succumb to rot in a rainy spring (even in raised beds). Put them on a slight slope and they are stars.
Daisy seems to be the trained geneticist in our group here, but I am seriously wondering about the role of epigenetics (hope I'm using this concept correctly) the influence of environment on gene expression. Even though all the iris of any given cultivar are clones of the one original seedling, thus with identical genes, where it was grown seems to make a difference.
In my 200 iris collection, the overwhelming majority of my iris are from a handful of hybridizers, with Keppel being #1. A number of years ago, I bought a bunch of iris from a grower in the southern California desert. All of those plants struggled for years to grow and thrive at my place though they were Keppels and Johnsons and Ghios and Blacks and Blyths, my usual suspects. Once an iris increases, which is a process of making new rhizomes, I'm reaching the conclusion that the increases become acclimatized in a way that the mother (ripped out of its birthplace and sent across the country) was not and this process can take a few generations of increase (the grandchildren of the original etc).
This also might touch on the question of why, when I get a box of beautiful rhizomes, some will bloom the following year and others not, even though they were planted a couple of feet apart so all other conditions are equal. Could the adaptability to environmental changes vary from cultivar to cultivar as a part of its genetic heritage? Hope some geneticists will chime in on this theory.
I did go on and on here...if you're still reading, thanks! And thank you again Brad, for your generous teaching.
