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Hi I am David Epstein. Welcome to Growing Wisdom.
I am standing in the middle of my rock garden. One of the things that I love about this rock garden just to give you guys a little insight of course we are at my house. This is the original rock garden when I bought the house 11 years ago, it is the original shape. I really have not changed it very much so I am kind of proud of that but what I have done is I have added this little guy and this is an iris, it is not a bearded iris, it is very tiny. It is just so perfect for the rock garden, it is called iris cristata, dwarf crested iris, the common name and it only gets to be about six inches high.
The flowers actually last a little bit longer than the bearded irises. Maybe one or two weeks and it make this wonderful ground cover. It likes part sun and it is an area where it does get some nice moisture and I love the foliage. So even when the flowers are gone, it is a wonderful plant for the foliage and just the way it maneuvers itself around this rock, it look so great. As soon it is done flowering, you can pull this out and give the little rhizomes to your friends or move it around the garden and plant it in different spaces. It is very easy to do.
What I have got here is one rhizome and three different pieces of plant coming of there. What I want to stress you folks is that this top part here of the rhizome has to be exposed .This is the case whether you use the small dwarf iris or use bearded iris, any form of iris wants to have this exposed, those roots there they need to be in the ground.
So you want to dig this in and have the soil level come up just to the base of the rhizome. Let the top of the rhizomes still be exposed. That is very important in order to get lots of blooms. If you cover the whole rhizome you will tend to get fewer and fewer blooms over the course of the years.
Okay one last thing that I do like to do before I transplant these is just give a little bit of a haircut. Just cut off the tops. So that is what I will replant. That is the final product before it goes back into the ground. It is just lets the plant develop better roots rather than a lot of green follage.
So that is a little dwarf iris for you and a little lesson on transplanting them. Hope you come back every week for all of our tips, hints and helps at GrowingWisdom.com.
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