How to Prune Irises

Okay, the next step that I'm going to do to prepare this perennial is I'm going to take my handy scissors and my bypass pruners. The bypass pruners I'm going to use to remove any of the seed pods that are on this iris. The seedpods are very nice. I like to save everything for a plant. I'll use these in dry flower arrangements for example. They come out very nicely, but I'll take the pruners and I'll just make cuts down the stem here. I'll take all these off because we don't need them on the plant anymore when it comes to dividing it. The first thing is to cut all these stems off. I'll try to do a fairly neat job so I can use them later in my flower arrangements. All these discarded stems are old spent flowers that already have passed. This iris in particular had a beautiful blue flower. It's a great plant for sun or shade. It's commonly used around pool areas, water garden areas because can tolerate some wet soil. It's an all around pretty good plant. When the flower's done blooming, you can see how it has this nice grassy texture here, which is another interest of the plant. It has quite a few blooms on it, as you can see. There's 2 clumps here that have gotten fairly large and quite a few blooms. You can see what a wonderful flowering plant it was. I mentioned about using the seedpods for dried flower arrangements. The regular flowers when they're in bloom are wonderful for fresh flower arrangements.