Kathleen Sayce
Over the years, a variety of
invertebrates and vertebrate flower-eating varmints have made their
presences known in my garden.
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| PCI 'Finger Pointing' is a lovely early flowering PCI, but fails to flower in many years due to wet windy weather. Seed set is also erratic due to vagaries of weather. |
Slugs and snails normally disdain
irises in general and Pacifica Iris in particular, but not when there
are young, tender leaves to be had early in the year, or tasty young
flower buds. One of the better reasons to pull old leaves and winter debris from the iris beds is to reduce hiding places for slugs and snails.
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| A tidied up PCI plant. Not shown: the five small snails and slugs that were removed with the dead leaves and winter debris. |
Then there are Stellar's Jays, which
find germinating iris seeds and seedlings to be a delicacy.
Black-tailed Deer also like Pacifica iris shoots, at least the first
few mouthfuls, before they start spitting them out and leaving them
alone.
And then the chipmunks moved in,
capable of disbudding entire flower beds in one night. It's enough to
make me think about an outside cat!
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| Right in the center of this image, the former flower bud, with the pedicle still visible between the bracts. Guilty party––a chipmunk. |
Jays and other seed eating birds drove me to use wire mesh to cover seed boxes. Once the seedlings are more than four inches tall, even the deer leave them alone, but until then these must be like alfalfa sprouts to them, young and tasty.
The weather doesn't help. Heavy rain
and hailstorms in April and May often end the flower display from
many a well known hybrid Pacifica Iris. I've used temporary covers
over plants so that I can at least get a few photos of flowers. But
there's a maxim that if the weather is wet enough to ruin early
flowers, then protecting them won't help seed set, because the bees
don't like rain and hail any more than the flowers do.
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| Rain screen deployed over a PCI plant. |
The flowering sequence at my latitude
(46 N) is something like this: Modern PCI hybrids begin flowering in
April, with the exception of PCI 'Premonition of Spring', which
flowers off and on from September to April. This group continues to
flower into May. In late April to May, many older Iris douglasiana
selections come into flower, including PCI 'Canyon Snow' and 'Cape
Ferrello'. In June, species irises begin flowering, including Iris
tenax, I chrysophylla and
I. innominata. A patch of I. tenax x I. innominata plants
regularly flower into late June, and sometimes into early July. Some
dwarf I. douglasiana plants also flower in June.
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| PCI 'Blue Plate Special' is ready to flower in early April. |
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| At the same time, Iris tenax is just getting started with new leaves. The difference is that the latter plant will flower better, and probably set more seeds, by flowering in June. In my climate, that makes a huge difference. |
Given a tendency lately for weather to
be too wet in April, and too hot in May for good seed set, often it's the
late flowering species and species crosses that do the best. I've
come to treasure the durable late flowering plants, because they are
more reliable than the gorgeous, early flowering hybrids.
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| PCI 'Blue Plate Special' in bud––a beautiful sight, but will there be flowers to follow? Only Pluvius, the god of rain, knows. |
