Re: I. brevicaulis won't set seed

I'm mystified as to why anyone wants them to go to seed unless they are 
trying to cross them. My only problemwith species (I love them) is that 
I don't always catch all the seed pods and so have a bunch of strays. 
Just curiousity?            Joan Cooper, Minnesota

Dennis Kramb wrote:

>I'm cross-posting this message, so some of you might see it twice.  But I 
>have a perplexing problem that I think both of these Yahoogroups can help 
>me with.
>
>A local nursery specializes in distributing seed of locally collected & 
>propagated wild flowers.  They have two enormous patches of Iris 
>brevicaulis that must contain upwards of 1,000+ plants.  This spring the 
>bloom was glorious, but by September there was only ONE seed pod to be found.
>
>Now the wild population still exists, but is substantially smaller than 
>what the nursery cultivates.  The wild population set abundant seed!  So 
>certainly the problem the nursery faces couldn't be related to rain fall, 
>or weather, or temperatures.
>
>Do you have any idea what could cause such a pathetic result?  Perhaps 
>overcrowding?  (They are indeed quite overcrowded!  If you try digging up a 
>single rhizome you'll get a whole mat of them crisscrossed together 2 or 3 
>layers deep.)  Herbicides?  They do not fertilize, so it couldn't be 
>overfertilization.  Could it be soil type?  I don't know.  I am totally 
>baffled.  I can't comprehend how so many hundreds (thousands?) of plants 
>could manage to only produce ONE seed pod!  Do any critters specialize in 
>eating iris pods???  mice?  deer?  bugs?  beetles?
>
>They get full sun at the nursery.  They are irrigated weekly.  Could 
>chemicals in the water be to blame?  A soil deficiency?  These plants 
>increase vegetatively without any problem, and show no sign of stress, 
>other than the occasional bout of rust.  They seem perfectly healthy I just 
>can't figure why they refuse to go to seed.  Neither can the nursery staff.
>
>Dennis in Cincinnati
>
>PS:  I have an article in the upcoming SIGNA issue about these I. brevicaulis.
>
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>Yahoo! Groups Links
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