doglover said: can not afford to keep loosing varieties that they paid good $$$'s for only to find they have who-knows-what coming back each year.
You haven't really lost anything. There's every chance that, when 'Rocket Randy' blooms next year, it will have the space age beard appendages you are hoping for. Sometimes, you get the wrong weather at the wrong time at some point during the spring and they end up not looking their best. This is what Sirocco Mist looked like two years ago in my garden:
I was quite disappointed in its form. This year, it looked like this:
This particular iris was hybridized by Barry Blyth. He could have tested it for 20 years and it still would have looked poor in 2011 and great in 2013 (except that I wouldn't have been able to buy it of course) in my garden. Just one of those things.
