After a really hard frost many of your iris leaves should no longer be green and viable so it is okay to clean up the spent foliage then. If the leaves are green and healthy there is no need to cut them back. Here are some guidelines I follow as pertains to iris foliage in my PNW garden. These comments/observations pertain to bearded irises only. Iris foliage is different at different times of the year. Foliage grown in early spring won't take summer heat, so in June and July I clean spent spring foliage off. Foliage grown in summer heat won't take fall frost, so I clean that out in fall or early spring (we don't have borers here so no worries about spent foliage laying about). In winter my irises have small 1-2 inch nubs of fans that stay green all winter. These disappear in spring as taller foliage comes up. I deliberately cut fans back to 4-6 inches only when digging and dividing - it keeps newly planted fans from falling over if top heavy. I remove any foliage that is diseased (leaf spotted) or turning brown from age as needed. I leave any healthy green leaves alone. Trimming leaf spotted fans often leaves them looking as if they were just trimmed to 4-6 inches, but the point was removing the leaf spotting - not just trimming for the sake of trimming. Hope this helps! Mike

I've been dying to let my color grow off and go natural. But the last time I got about 2" of new growth and saw that ton of grey, I chickened and went to buy a box of L'Oreal 7 1/2A. :) I have been known to tweak on some of my cuts when I get back from the hairdresser's, but I wouldn't know where to begin to cut my own all over. Maybe if I could take my head off and set it down in front of me. How in the world does anyone cut behind their head looking in a mirror. I'd lose an ear or something. LOL Pretty cut/color on a pretty lady Deb.

Nancy in a word yes if I wanted the extra plants, otherwise I would just snip. I sometimes tease them apart if planted in 4,6 or 9 packs or always if I've planted them in a community pot. Personally I dislike peat pellets, I find they restrict root growth to much, I've lost fuchsias, when investigated as to why they didn't over winter when others were just fine, every one of them had been started in a peat pellet and their roots had barely penetrated those darn things. Another thing, not so much out in the garden but if transplanting into bigger pots and they happens to get a little too dry, good luck that little peat pellet drys up like a piece of concrete. other people might have good luck with them, I don't. If I find I've bought things that have been started in these, I remove the net? covering, it does help a bit. Annette

I leave some on but cut and dry others for flower arrangements and wreaths that our garden club makes for a local shelter. If they brown up, we use spray paint and they are quiet decorative. We don't have a lot of snow in the PNW (although we had snow flurries today) to make them collapse! I also keep many old blossoms heads on the bushes for the birds. Most of the lacecaps are left alone and they stay beautiful for a long time especially after the larger outside infertile blossoms turn red on the underside and turn down. Some Macs with large mop heads will splay like Kluis Superba with full blossoms on the ground. The Kluis blossoms will turn green, turquoise, purple and blue even when dried. Sometimes there will be more than 15 little dark birds scratching under the bushes in the late fall and winter looking for treats. I don't see these as ugly, just the next show in the long seasonal cycle of the plants.