Bearded Iris

This is the same as mine!

What's it called? We inherited it with the garden.

Me too inherited mine, so I don't know the name. Sorry!

Iris used to be my favourite flower...I had them everywhere I could possibly put them.....When I see a picture like that with a full bloom and fat buds I understand why I had an obsession with them.

With this blooming properly for the first time, I have fallen in love with them too, Pims. I sent off for some highly scented ones from Claire Austin, and am busy bringing them back to life in tubs! I can't wait to see the flowers, but they won't happen this year, that's for sure! I hadn't realised that irises could be perfumed!

My neighbour tore some up out of her garden for me - and when I say 'tore up' I was standing there with baited breath thinking "Oooh! The roots! They'll die!" But, two years on, they've rallied round and I now have a lovely show of flowers for the first time. Have yours got variegated leaves, Gattina? That's part of the reason why I love them - the leaves stay when all else has disappeared for Winter!

No, unfortunately, they haven't, and yesterday I discovered that SOMETHING - I suspect those darned porcupines have razed a lot of mine to the ground. There are rhizhomes with great teethmarks in them and a load of "felled" leaves. Ggggrrrr!

Oh! Poor you! It's infuriating when you put so much work into making something nice and a critter comes along and undoes all the good work in 3 seconds flat! I felt just like you do now on our return from Christmas holiday and found the sheep had got into our garden and eaten the sprouts and cabbages! At least the sheep can be controlled (up to a point) but I can't think of anything but a barbedwire-wrapped spade to beat off those beasties! Hope there's some plants left to regroup for next year? :o(

Oh yes - and these were pretty much a bonus in the first place - inherited and moved and improved, but this was the first year they'd put on such a lovely display. We saw a dead porcupine in a field the other day and it was HUGE! We mistook it for a boar from a distance. There's no way I'm challenging one of those if it wants my plants! I heaved rocks I'd probably fell the rest of the irises.

That's a lovely photo, Gattina. How frightening to have to contend with huge porcupines! It rather puts my slugs and snails into proportion!

It's all a part of life's rich tapestry, Mel! You should see the size of the snails we get, too. Scared the living daylights out of me when we first came across them. Now the British ones look like dear little miniatures by comparison.

We seem to grow them big on this side of the Big River, Gattina!

I found this site for you Gattina...stumbled on it while looking for a bearded iris named Villain..i know that you were looking for a very dark blue. When you get there have a look at one called Black Forest

http://historiciris.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/tall-bearded-iris-old-black-magic.html

Thank you, Pims - Good memory, that man! That certainly is very dark, isn't it? Some useful links in there, too.

My husband just loves snails (well - he's not a gardener, is he?) and over the years I've become quite tolerant of them - except when they eat my hostas. I only have one now, in a pot, because when I first fell in love with them (hostas, not snails!) I had a lot of slugs and snails in the garden. The balance is pretty good now - some but not too many. And as someone said yesterday at Chelsea - no pests, no predators! Perhaps OH might not be too keen on giants, though!

Ours are so big, you could put saddles on them and enter them in the Grand National! ;-) (slight case of exaggeration there, but only slight) Even the cats are scared of them.

What you need are a couple of the lovely green lizards that appeared in our garden in yesterdays' heat, Gattina (and, yes, Sheila was here to see them too!). Partner became a 'friend' to one of them a few years ago as, while he was digging, he'd come across the 'dinosaur-sized' snails and popped them up on the wall where the lizard liked to sunbathe. He said the crunching he could handle, but it was the lip licking afterwards that turned his stomach! But, I have to say, our snail population is much lower now than it was!

We get lots of lizards - very pretty little ones with mosaic tummies in jewel colors, but they are tiny, and the snails could engulf them with one surge. The cats catch far too many of theses pretty creatures and eat them. It always makes them spectacularly ill, but they never learn.

You see! Daft things! You wouldn't catch a dog constantly eating something that upset his tum! ;o)