CULT: disease re

From: Linda Mann <lmann@icx.net>

Patrick Orr in ? New Mexico? asked:
> has anyone worked on developing a rot resistant
> iris? 

There are a LOT of irises that are rot resistant - but resistance is
relative.  In my experience (I used to be the Rot Queen in the early
days of the iris list), susceptibility to rot has more to do with how
stressed the plant is than anything else.  So any given cultivar may be
more or less stressed (hence rot prone) to different degrees in
different gardens.  For example, a cultivar that never rots in
...Maine?.. may be excessively stressed by heat and drought in Tennessee
and rot as soon as it rains in the summer.  And vice versa - iris
cultivars happy in Tennessee may not be able to cope with long periods
of cold and snow farther north.

After successfully killing a lot of cultivars, I now have a pretty
good-sized collection of TBs that don't usually rot here.  But they may
rot like crazy or have other disease problems in other climates and
soils.  For example, I know that at least a few cultivars that thrive in
my excessively drained deep gravelly loam are somewhat prone to rot in
clay soils when we have long rainy spells.

I am daubing pollen with a goal of developing disease resistant, stress
tolerant cultivars, but am not optimistic about having anything worth
introducing anytime soon.  Most of the tough cultivars I have now are
from the 80s or older.  

If you search the archives for <rot>, you will learn more about rot than
you ever wanted to know, both opinions, observations, and cultivars that
do and don't.

There are two schools - those who will do anything to keep a cultivar
alive and those who let the weaklings die.  I'm in the latter school.

Linda Mann east Tennessee USA
on vacation - pond fishin' & planting potted irises & trying not to
think of too many more things that I can't get done.  Another drip of
rain today, but the ground is still bone dry.

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