Beautiful! I have a soft spot for tall bearded.

Can't decide which is the most beautiful!

Those are gorgeous! My iris bloomed over a month ago, but they are plain, nothing like your beauties!

Bee-u-tee-full!

ooooo!!!!! Ahhh!!!!!

They're gorgeous. Mine have bloomed and gone already.

Truly GORGEOUS Susan!!!!!!!! Loved seeing them!

Thank you! One of my favorite flowers!

Only our lilacs are blooming now, including the pale Persian near my kitchen window Enjoying the fragrance with me is a sitting robin -- our first-ever nest in that Japanese Maple.

Just beautiful! I dug up as many of mine as possible and planted them here at the new house. No blooms yet but the leaves look good.

Lovely! Do you still have your William Baffin rose?

Those are beautiful, Alisande!

Just beautiful! I love bearded iris, they almost grew wild on the farm where I grew up. I remember my mom digging them up to thin them, tossing the extras in a ditch along the road, & they'd grow and bloom there. They don't grow here. :^(

Rusty

Murraysmom, that's beautiful! I love the color. I remember most of the names of my irises because the names factored into many of my choices. High Point reminded me of Highmount, where my dad spent many happy times growing up. Swingtown because my daughter Gillian loved swing dancing, and Perfect Pitch because she was a musician.

Skibby, you remembered! Yes, it's still going (and growing) strong. It has just started blooming. Here it is last year.

This is Mistis, a Louisiana iris. Not a good rendition of the color....it is a mauvey pink. Louisiana irises are bog irises and grow best under wet conditions. Mistis is the first one I ever grew, and was given to me back in 1976, which started me on a love affair with Louisiana irises, since I had several ponds and grew waterlilies. At one time, I had about 150 varieties, and I loved to dabble with crossing them. Mistis is always the first to bloom....almost reliably on March 31st but bloomed very early this year, on March 23.

I'd never heard of those, Marilyn. It's lovely! Crossing them must have been fun.

Beautiful pictures! I do have a lot of them in all kinds of colors (wouldn’t it be weird if I didn’t?), but I don’t have any names. My favorite is probably the really dark red one. Don’t think I took pictures of them this year. Edited. Found a picture from last year, but the color doesn’t really show.

Alisande, they were developed from hybridizing 5 species. Some occured naturally, and that got people interested in collecting them from the swamps of Louisiana, back around the 1940's, and from there, crossing and recrossing and they have really changed a lot now. Mistis is a fairly old variety. The newer varieties are very ruffled and fancy, but I kind of like the older ones. They go good with wildflowers.

So pretty! Interesting that they grow in swamps, while we are cautioned not to plant tall bearded iris in wet areas.

Iris S., (yes, I love your name), that's a great clump! I had two dark reds (Dynamite and Samurai Warrior), but they disappeared--along with some others. I'm not sure how that happens . . . I guess they just weren't suited to my environment (or it's my fault somehow). I may look for another red.

Most of my irises came from BlueJiris.com, which I learned about on GardenWeb. I had bought several at Schreiner's, and was amazed at BlueJ's prices--at the time mostly $2.50 to $3. Now they're $5 and up, but still a bargain compared to most suppliers.

In 1976, I met a college professor who also raised and hybridized waterlilies, and later, Louisiana irises, and he gave me my first Louisiana irises. When they bloomed, I was so completely taken by them. I couldn't believe something so beautiful for ponds existed. (It was like when I discovered koi.) So I set out to buy irises. At the time it was a little hard to find them in specialty nurseries...and not knowing any better, I bought bearded irises. You can imagine how that worked planting them around my ponds! Later I did find sources, and have loved them ever since.

Yes, I can imagine, Marilyn! You must have been disappointed in those bearded irises. :-)

When an occasional one of mine gets knocked over I don't mind because a cut stem provides a lovely show at the window over my kitchen sink.

I wish I could smell all these irises! This evening I walked through my own garden and something was smelling so nice. It might have been daylilies, which are sometimes fragrant. The only other blooms in the area I walked through was one little true lily and some daisies, yet sometimes the latter smell like dirty feet. But irises, ah! (My irises have been out of bloom for three weeks.)

So nice, Kittywhiskers! They have some of that old-fashioned charm, combined with modern breeding, it looks like. Thanks for sharing.