Planting and Dividing Bearded Iris Corms

There are multiple varieties of iris, some are water plants (aka flags) and others are garden plants that are fairly drought tolerant.  The most well-known variety in the USA is the bearded iris.  It is called that because it has a furry-looking part and petal that hangs down like a beard. Bearded iris grows from corms, which are long tuber rather than round or flat bulbs.  Irises are easy-to-grow and do not require much effort once they are planted.  

Most of the irises in my garden are from divisions taken from my grandmother's garden or from transplants she gave to my mother.  My grandmother gave me these directions for planting corm-type iris.  The back of the iris is called tail feathers, the iris will grow outward from the tail, and new "chicks" will grow from the sides of the corm or belly.  So plant the iris with the corm facing in the direction where you want it to grow towards building a clump.  Plant them in full to part-shade - more sun means more flowers!  Dig new holes for corms only slightly deeper than the corm height.  Bearded iris prefer to be close to the top of the ground with just enough dirt covering them to prevent drying out from sunshine hitting it.  

To dig up bearded iris to move or divide, use a shovel or pitchfork pushed 1-2 inches below ground at an angle to move beneath the plants.  Push down of the tool as a lever until you hear the iris pop out of the ground.  If you have not divided in over 3 years, you may need to move to an opposite side of iris clump to dig a large corm with lots of chicks.  When digging and dividing iris, the chicks with roots can be broken off the mother corm and planted separately to get even more plants.  If you do not plan to plant the new iris corms quickly, cut the tail down to a 3-inch fan to help conserve the moisture for the stored corms.  

Did you know iris can climb trees?  My mom had a large oval flower bed that she made an iris fencei ended  around by planing the tail outside and letting the plants grow into the center of the bed around a large flowing bush.  I thought that was a cool idea, so I decided to try the same thing around a tree.  A few years later, I saw this weird thing growing on the base of my tree.  When I got closer, it was a long bar iris corm!  Its roots were  growing into the tree bark and would not come easily off.  I had to carefully dig around the tree roots to loosen corms in the dirt, which was not easy as some tree roots had grown over some of the corms.   I had to cut some corms into 2-4 pieces to get them out from under roots and the ones growing in the bark broke too as I tried to pry them off.  The process took hours!  Needless to day, I do not recommend planting bearded iris around trees.