----- Orig inal Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 11:38
PM
Subject: Re: [iris-photos]NOID:ID's
Morning all.
I agree it's most frustrating to find a
mislabelled iris, especially after waiting a few years for it to
bloom. My original 10 or so irises were never labelled when I bought
them, but they were blooming, so at least I knew the colour and I'd never seen
miniature or dwarf irises before. I immediately fell in love with
them!!!
After years of buying other irises that sounded
close in descriptions, I have since given up on ever identifying those, being
a more experienced isarian now, but I still keep them in one bed by my
driveway and include them in my garden tours. I tell people there is no
certain way to ever conclusively identify unknown irises. Hopefully,
some are listening.
I also try to check out the local nurseries in
spring and advise them when they have an iris in bloom that is
mislabelled. Sometimes the manager comes out and I bring out the bigger
guns, mentioning that I'm an iris display garden and just want to help you
ensure you're selling a correctly labelled product. It's not always
hard, since the blooming iris has a label with an actual picture of the iris
right on the label; how hard is it to look at the iris & the picture and
see that one is yellow and the blooming iris is no where close to being
yellow. I'm sure they cringe now when they see me walk in. I have
returned to the same store, where they had removed all the mislabelled irises,
but when I went back a few days later, there they were back up on the tables,
for sale again. Another nursery removed the labels and sold them as
unknowns.
I have friends who do this with hostas, daylilies
& lilies.
One year, I returned a huge bag of blooming
daylilies to Costco (hard to resist the price of some boxed offerings),
because they weren't the daylilies pictured on the box. They were bright
orange and could be seen from miles away. The box was labelled as
Catherine Woodbury, which is a very light pink or lavender. I was quite
upset, especially since orange is a colour that isn't often allowed into my
garden, aside from exceptional irises! It must have been quite a sight,
since the 6 daylilies were huge and blooming right out of the plastic shopping
bag I had dumped them into and all the blossoms were bobbing around around and
up and down, to the extreme agitation of my angry stride into the store.
Since then, I try to return mislabelled plants back to the store
they came from. I keep all the bills until I'm convinced I got what
I wanted to buy.
I label every plant that comes into my garden,
and am currently replacing less reliable labels with copper ones, using the
longest part of a hanger as the stake. The stake gets pushed very deeply
into the soil, so hopefully it won't get pulled out by mistake or by anything
else that happens by. This is just the first year of trying out these
labels, however.
As I've mentioned before, all my new rhizomes are
planted in a nusery bed, alphabetized by class. I try to remember to
take pictures of the irises as they bloom, but a video is a great idea!
I also track all my plants in a database (since 1985), so I know what I've
bought, what year, what it cost, and am working on adding in the breeder for
the older plants.
Nowaday, I think many gardeners do want to know
the names of the plants in their gardens, but they may not always label
them. They just want to know that they have that specific plant and know
that it's somewhere in a particular bed. I actually print off my plant
list every spring and mark what has survived and what has not. I'm not a
breeder, nor a nursery, but there are many more just like me out here.
Just like when a stranger stops by, I've got to know their name!
El, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Z3
DIS & MIS Display Garden
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 11:13
PM
Subject: RE:
[iris-photos]NOID:ID's
Robert,
There are two points I would like to add to your discussion
below. First, the vast majority of gardeners don't care about the
cultivar names of their plants. That applies to roses and daylilies as
well as irises. Those of us who do care know that it takes 3 levels of
documentation (computer map, field staking and video taping) combined with
an obsessive attention to detail to maintain accurate records. That means
that even more errors are to be expected. I have been told that during bloom
season Schreiner's has a 3 man crew who spend all day rouging the field
beds.
Second point is that identification technology is still not up to the
level to be fully useful. The most obvious level of identification is
visual. Until there is a color standard that can be
used with color calibrated cameras and monitors, there is
little hope of significant improvement over current practices. I was
having a similar conversation about a year ago and made the statement
that this identification problem would only be solved when a complete
DNA profile had to be attached to the AIS registration form. Someone in the
group who knew a lot more about DNA profiling than I do stated that that
technology had a lot more development to do before it would be useful for
this purpose. It has to be able to distinguish between siblings.
When I find a misidentified clump in my garden, I replace the
cultivar name stake with one that says "for sale immediately". When a
customer is interested, I watch their body language closely and price the
clump to sell then. When the customer says "Yes"
I get the shovel. The customer is happy and I
am happy to get rid of the NOID.
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