In a message dated 4/9/2008 2:49:19 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
flatnflashy@yahoo.com writes:
--- In iris-photos@yahoogroups.com,
Jan Lauritzen
<janicelauritzen@...> wrote:
>
> Hi
Christian,
I'm confused. To my eye my picture, and iris, do not look
anything
like the "proliferation". For one thing mine is still very
much in
the dirt- er clay. I'll buy the asexual part...
This is
one branch of the rhizome clump which ends in the fan whose
base is
visible in the second shot. This part of the rhizome
has "normal"
increases off to the sides, you can see them at the
bottom of the second
picture.
Maybe I'm just operating under a faulty understanding of how
iris
rhizomes grow. I'm accepting as normal that the rhizome makes new
leaves until it reaches bloom size, blooms, and dies. Hopefully, the
rhizome pauses long enough to create "daughter" rhizomes, which are
usually lateral of the "mother" rhizome. Operating in that
perspective, the appearance of several fans on top of a
single
"mother" rhizome, as appears to be the case with this plant,
is
abberant.
I don't know that this applies in your case, but I have seen daughter
rhizomes growing on top of a mother rhizome when the mother's growing point had
been damaged so that it couldn't bloom, or when growing conditions were such
that there was little room for normal lateral increase. Ancestry is also a
factor, as some species tend to bunch while others sprawl.
Sharon McAllister
