Re: Spuria?

At 10:00 AM 8/6/96 -0600, you wrote:
>:Do people in zone 5 or 6 grow Spuria Iris? It don't seem so.
>:
>
>I live on the cold side of zone 6, and I grow them here without difficulty.
>
>I think winter cold is not much of a problem for them, but they do
>like hot, dry summers and (unlike most other beardless irises) they
>*don't* need a woodsy, acid soil. I think it is for these reasons
>that spurias are especially popular in California and the southwest.
>These areas also happen to have mild winters, but that is not a
>requirement for growing spurias.
>
>Happy irising, Tom.
>
>===============================================================
>
>Tom Tadfor Little         tlittle@lanl.gov  -or-  telp@Rt66.com
>technical writer/editor   Los Alamos National Laboratory
>---------------------------------------------------------------
>Telperion Productions     http://www.rt66.com/~telp/
>===============================================================

Our summers here in the Willamette Valley in OR are not always hot because
the nights are quite cool, but they are decidedly dry.  Spuria are among my
most trouble-free iris, growing happily in our slightly heavy native silt
loam.  This year CINNAMON STICK, EVENING DRESS, LUCKY DEVIL, and
RESPECTABLE, all nice dark colored ones did especially well because they
have finally made good clumps.  I also had some of my own
'selecting-for-dark-colors' seedlings bloom for the first time and this is
especially exciting for me, even though some of them were muddy-blah colors
that will eventually be discarded.

In my forays into the wilds, I see huge clumps of spurias growing in
abandoned homestead sites at fairly high elevations again attesting to their
toughness. Our nasty Oregon gastropods (slugs) don't even eat them!  They
are slow to increase at first and can be quite pokey from seed, taking
several years to bloom, but always worth the wait.   They have very long
deep roots and this may explain why they will often fail to bloom for a year
(or two, or three!) when they have been divided. 

A little travel log, hopefully not too far astray from our favorite plant topic:

I did see some beautiful lush gardens in Lisbon and those without space grow
things on their walls.  We stayed in an old guesthouse in the crowded, but
amazingly quiet and peaceful Alfama (old city), and saw plants in pots
everywhere.  People even had them in pots suspended from the ends of their
wall-mounted clotheslines.  There were narrow charming little alley ways
with a million stairs to climb that were lined with an endless array of
potted plants.  It just barely freezes there, so I saw things that I grow as
houseplants in tree-like proportion.  There are loads of iris, but they were
of course past bloom.  I even saw them planted along the top of an old 11th
century fortress wall (limestone) at Costelo St. Jorge. 

Ooo, excitement!  My husband just came up here with a package from nearby
Laurie's Garden.  Time to go hit the dirt!  Isn't this affliction fun? 

Louise H. Parsons  <parsont@peak.org>
listowner, Alpine-L,the Electronic Rock Garden Society
Corvallis, OR  USA USDA zone 7 , Emerald NARGS, AIS, SIGNA, SPCNI,
transplanted Oregrowian 
http://www.peak.org/~parsont/rockgard/

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