Irises In Your Garden

Hi! I'm Scott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com. I would like to talk to you about perennial gardens. Probably my favorite perennial is Iris. There are so many different types. They can do so many different things in the garden. It is a very versatile genus of plants. My border up here in the front I use three different types. They are three of the basic ones that you see an awful lot of so we will review them. The first one that come into bloom is the German Iris, the bearded iris and you can see why people call it a bearded iris because it has this frill in here, the beard. The other two parts of the Iris flower are the standards the part that stands up right here and in this case, sort of a lilac color and the valves the purple part that you see here the beard sits in. One of my favorite Iris's is this one here. This is a Siberian Iris. This is Caesar's brother. Now we can see on the Siberian Iris we still have standards, we still have valves but not beard. It is one of the things that sets it apart. The other thing that sets it apart from the bearded Iris is this grassy like foliage which is much more upright narrow compared to the wide fan shaped blades of the German Iris. Both of these guys come into color and sequence very nicely from the German which is just on its way out to Siberian who is just on his way in. Probably another month down the road here we will get to the Japanese Iris. This is probably my favorite. Japanese Iris does famously in a garden border situation like this but it will do just as well in the edge of a pond or water feature. The other nice thing about it is it is even a bigger bloom than the Siberian Iris.