May is always remarkably busy in the garden. It goes from largely native spring ephemera to the big blowsy traditional flowers that people associate with old-fashioned gardens: roses, peonies, bleeding hearts and allium.
But before talking about those more traditional plants, perhaps in the next post or two, I would like to talk about Iris cristata. Today, the foliage is doing its ground cover duty, but at the beginning of the month, the Iris cristata were just leafed out and showing flower buds.
The flowers start peeking out on a sunny morning and unfurl pretty quickly. This year we had some cool nights, so they took a few days.
They don’t seem to like more than a few hours of sun, but full shade doesn’t work for them either. The more shade they have, the later in May they open. The flowers last a couple of weeks if it doesn’t get hot.
For the most part, they were near the end of their blooming period when we got some heat, at which point the flower petals rolled up tightly, very similarly to the bearded irises you are more accustomed to. The foliage will last the rest of the growing season at about this height, and the flowers will be back next year.
Technical Note on the Photographs
Blues, lavenders, and purples are very hard to capture accurately digitally. The last photograph is a bit closer to the real flower color than the middle one, but the truth is somewhere between them.