Re: Bloom time

I have always looked for ways to increase bloom time and see several solutions which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
There are several varieties that I recommend for this. Sheba's Queen is one. This is a very nice red coloured flower that is a bit strappy and with tight branching. It's colour is stunning, it always makes good garden clumps, lots of bloom stalks and increases. It remains in bloom for about four weeks. Darkside also does this. 

1)My own Canadian Boarder will also remain in bloom for about four weeks. It has a very unique characteristic which is not immediately obvious. It has about 10-12 buds. It took me a long time to realize this as whenever I went to count them I could only find 6-7. The others were so small (at start of bloom) that there not noticeable. These bud would slowly develop and then bloom. The only way to count them was to wait until it finished blooming. I don't know of any other plant that does this.

2)Another way is with the Carpet series of flowers that I have been introducing. These plants all have very small rhizome trigger size. This is something that I refer to as the size a rhizome has to be before it blooms. The Carpet iris will bloom with a very small sized rhizome. Thus it stand considerable crowding before it starts to suffer it terms of bloom. The only way to properly evaluate this is to let a plant grow in a clump for a while and see how it copes with crowding. A lot of plants get such good care while being evaluated that they are never evaluated for this.

3)The other route is the rebloom, particularly the daylight independent rebloomers. Some rebloomers will bloom only in response to the amount of daylight. Thus they rebloom in the fall when the amount of daylight is equal to the same about that triggers spring bloom. This is particularly noticeable with SDB. Most rebloomering SDB bloom for me September/ October and are cut down by frost. Forever Blue is daylight independent and blooms whenever a rhizome reaches its trigger size, regardless of the amount of daylight. It starts to bloom here mid May and finishes its initial bloom at end of June, a full six weeks. It then starts up again after about 6 days and then goes contiguously until heavy frost.

There of course are also sequential bloom and sequential bloom stocks. Some plants put up stocks at different times on the same clumps. Darkside and Sheba's do both of these. 
All these factors need to be looked at and evaluated with new plants when  seedlings are to selected.
--
Chuck Chapman, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Zone 4/5
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