Re: Re: CULT: Growing Iris South Florida
iris@hort.net
  • Subject: Re: Re: CULT: Growing Iris South Florida
  • From: P* <4*@rewrite.hort.net>
  • Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 15:52:04 -0500
You are referring to folks breeding for rebloomers no further south than 7b? Isn't Walter Moores in zone 8 MS? Where was Bernice Miller? She no longer is a breeder of course. 

No one in TX breeding for re?
On the matter of blooming and vegetative cycles. I'm pretty confused as to what has been said. My fault since I haven't read all the past posts intensely enough to glean this out. Chuck and Linda, are we still at question on whether or not they are intertwined so tightly that lack of rebloom will definitely cause malfunction in the vegetative cycle at some point? Even if we allow that the veg cycle might manage a year or more of continued cycling before fizzling out. (I understand lack of vegetative growth will eventually shut down blooming due to inadequate energy resources alone. But this is more or less reset independent.) Or can veg and bloom cycles be independent on their mechanisms for how each gets vernalized and/or otherwise reset? Hope my questions are understandable.
An illustration of why I ponder this: I have different cultivars whose clumps grow and increase for years with little blooming. I curse my Germanica; it is so sparse to bloom yet grows/increases like a weed. It just seems we have to have this going on: Mother rhizome gives rise to increases. The mother dies without blooming. The increases become mothers and the same cycle happens. The cycle can go on multi-year with rhizomes behaving in a exclusively vegetative mode. It happens in other rhizomaceous plants, no? Of course different plants groups have different pathways so this is not in any way a certainly in TBs, just evidence of a possibility. Within genus Iris, some of the beardless seem to do this, no? Iris pseudoacorus?
Or is it possible that, provided the various rhizomes in a clump stay functionally capable of transferring reset signals to each other, the bloom of 1 or more rhizomes can transfer the needed reset signal to the rhizomes cycling in vegetative mode? This would allow sparse bloom on the part of the functional multiple rhizome unit (the clump or parts thereof) but success overall.
Potentially this could require human intervention at some point to divide & reset the units (thereby maintaining functional interconnection?) Reset is a given we accept as part of culturing TBs overall. And more intensive disease control in FL might be just part of the way to be successful. (We accept this for golf courses. etc) Not a deal-breaker. So in FL, maybe not easy, but doable. 

Please pardon so many hypotheses in one lump.

Shaub Dunkley

On 11/10/2014 8:16 AM, Linda Mann wrote:
So here we are, growing irises in zones 4? (Chuck) and no farther south than 7b (me), guessing at what could or couldn't work to start a <breeding> program for TBs in south Florida! ;-) I can tell bloom season is over for us for the year. 

Infinitely curious iris breeders...

Linda Mann

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