By Bonnie J. Nichols
In 2013
Texas had a wet and very cold winter. We
had more snow than we had seen in years.
The April 2014 bloom season was spectacular. From the SDBs to TBs and beyond. Winter in 2014 and 2015 had enough cold
winter weather to give us good bloom.
Then came
last winter. Actually, what winter? In December when the Christmas Day
temperature was 82 degrees and New Year’s Eve was 73 degrees, we knew the iris
bloom season was in jeopardy. And, it
didn’t get better when on January 31st the high temperature of the
day was 79 degrees.
When I saw
various bearded irises blooming in December and January I asked friends if they
thought the bloom was “rebloom” OR what would have been our April spring
bloom. We all had no idea. In April, we knew the sparse bloom we had
seen in December and January was “the spring bloom” because we kept waiting and
kept waiting and we had no additional bloom.
Maybe 20% tall bearded irises bloomed and very limited (if any) of the medians
bloomed. The Louisiana and Spuria bloom
was not damaged by the mild winter.
We skimped
and scraped and came up with enough blooms for our iris shows and we shrugged
off the fact that we could not control Mother Nature. We saw more than normal increases on some of
the plants because they did not use their energy to bloom. On other plants we noticed something that we
had not had much experience with – “lightbulb” bloomed-out rhizomes. Lightbulbs are rhizomes with no increases and
the roots wither away. Now I can spot
the “lightbulbs” before digging. The
rhizome increases in size and twists slightly as if it is pushed out of the
ground. This could be the result of the
roots drying out. Some of the
“lightbulbs” bloom. The bloom stalk
comes up in the middle of the fan and dies back quickly. The rhizome eventually dries up and dies
also.
When I see a
lightbulb rhizome sending up a stalk, I have unsuccessfully tried to make
crosses on the blooms. I was hoping to
force a pod and force the plant to increase.
While my
experiments and observations are interesting…………I hope we have a colder winter
in 2017 and eventually get back to good iris bloom and the “lightbulbs” are a
thing of the past. However, as I write
this article we are 2 ½ weeks from Thanksgiving and our Dallas temperature high
today was 91 degrees. Global warming? –
I’m not sure; however, I’m beginning to believe it is.
