The Iris Garden at Shangri la

This is the iris garden for 2015.  I've been growing iris since 1973 and it is my favorite flower.  The garden is visited by 3 different types of large bees that work the blooms.  

View of Stone Bench

View from Rock Garden

View of Iris Bed

Iris in a Pot

Golden Muffin in Container

Yes you can grow iris in containers.  This one was planted July 2013 and does very well in a pot.  They have to be re potted every other year and 3 good sized rhizomes per container will do.  I choose a container that is close to a 5 gal bucket with good drainage. By July the iris have finished putting on new growth and enter into a semi dormant stage during the dry months.    This dormant period will last until the end of Sep when the fall rains have broke their dormancy and they put on more rhizome growth.  As soon as I planted them I kept them watered until they were well established.  The pot contains plenty of compost and a small amount of 20-10-10 fertilizer...about 1/4 cup. They are left out in the garden all year.  And when they bloom the container can be put anywhere you want.

Linda's Herb Harvest

Linda Bob's Herbs

Here is a sample of Mrs. Stickfigure's herb harvest.  Shown here, clockwise from the left, are sage, rosemary, oregano, and creeping thyme.  She dries them and stores them in plastic boxes the size of shoe boxes.  The sage I have dug up a runner that has rooted and potted it up to give to a friend.  The rosemary and thyme can also be done that way by layering a branch into the soil and weighting with a rock.  Fresh herbs sure do taste good and an herb garden is fairly easy to keep up.

Bloom Day 4/15/15

Welcome to Blogger's Bloom Day.  This is an iris I acquired about 25 years ago.  It is my wife's favorite and it is easy to see why.  What makes it a great iris is it's habit.  The blooms are spaced in such a way that they produce this little mass of color.

Golden Muffin Iris

A Poem, Winter is Excused

Winter is excused
from her dreary work.
To celebrate a gentle jew
she preps a terra firma cake.

She glazes first with frozen rain,
just an inch or two,
Then dusts a fluffy frosting on
borrowed from the dew.

The critters stitch a greeting
with hurried, scurried script.
Proud balloons apologize
and open an azure window up.

A solitary candle
suspends infinity
for brighter, gayer atmospheres
and hospitality

The brook and feathered choristers
Great guest, the mountaineers
Glad breezes teases, tickles, tingles
deciduous chandeliers.

"Happy birthday, little King"
 twinked a northern star
While the bashful moon Noctombolist
ran naked from the day.

MG Morris

Noid update

Here is a specimen I picked up at the Oxley Nature Center next to the parking lot.  I believe it is the same species as the one that fell out of my 110 year old botany book.  There are some differences that I noticed.  The first is that the seed pods are larger on the older one.  Second is the position of the pods on the plant.  In the older one there are quite a few pods near the base of the plant.  Yet there is also one near the base of the new one.  I'm pretty sure that the older specimen is a more mature plant.  I would love to look at the tissues under a microscope to see if they match but I don't know how to do that yet.

The older specimen on the left may be C. oligosperma because of the difference in seed and pod size.

Old vs New Specimens

Cardamine Hirsuta from notebook