Re: CULT: HYB: heat/cold dormancy, species
iris@hort.net
  • Subject: Re: CULT: HYB: heat/cold dormancy, species
  • From: L* M* <l*@lock-net.com>
  • Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:32:05 -0500
Way back when I was still growing all the irises in the ground (instead of putting storeboughts in pots), we had some discussion here about various cultivars that dropped their leaves here during heat/drought and during winter.
Those cultivars that protected themselves via dropping foliage seemed to be the most reliable bloomers here. So before I started breeding my own seedlings, I did a <lot> of deep pedigree tracking, trying to come up with some commonality of ancestry to see if that would help me identify other cultivars that might do well here that I might want to buy. All they seemed to have in common were some aphylla, variegata, and maybe some reichenbachii or balkana genes way back, but the same could also be said for a lot of cultivars that <don't> have that habit.
Backgrounds are way too scrambled this far down the line to conclude much. Neither aphylla or variegata cultivars that I've tried here have tolerated my growing conditions.
Chuck, let me know if you are interested in names of some of the cultivars I knew of that were quick to express that trait here and I'll try to dig up the info.
<In my garden this is a protective mechanism. It helps them survive. In 2007 
so many seedlings dropped their fans that I thought I'd lost entire crosses.
Intoductions for other places did too, but I was mainly concerned with the
seedlings! Betty>

<<ENGLISH COTTAGE, for example, went totally bald and dead
ooking last summer during the heat and drought,>>

<Thanks for your observations re heat dormancy. Helpful  to have these field
obaservations from climates differernt then mine.Chuck Chapman>

Linda Mann east TN USA zone 7

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