India Hurst can pinpoint the precise moment her obsession with the tall bearded iris took hold. It was in 2017, when the florist and flower grower was on holiday on the American West Coast, and had taken a detour to Schreiner’s — a fourth-generation flower farm in Salem, Oregon that is America’s biggest grower of the exuberant perennial.
“They were the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen,” she says of the 150 acres of blooms. “I thought, ‘OK, I need to grow these.’”
Hurst returned home to the Teme Valley, on the Worcestershire-Shropshire border, and placed the first of many orders for iris rhizomes. These first bare roots have flourished into a fifth of an acre plot where long raised beds are filled with around 600 plants. This season’s flowering has been the best yet, she says — and the most fragrant too; Iris germanica, its botanical name, has the most extraordinary heady scent.
The collection feeds not only into her floral design studio, Vervain, but also a seasonal sideline: Falls & Standards, named after the flower’s lower and upper petals, which supplies cut stems to other florists. It caters to what she and her partner, Chris Fletcher, with whom she runs both sides of the business, saw as “a gap in the market”.
Hurst grew up in a family of horticulturalists; her rural set-up is shared with her parents, who ran an award-winning organic plant nursery there for almost five decades, while her great-grandfather founded Alton Greenhouses in 1921 — a business that still makes cedar greenhouses in the UK today. Hurst launched Vervain in 2014, creating arrangements for weddings, events, editorial shoots and installations. (When we speak in late May, she’s just had her busiest week to date, creating installations for Chelsea in Bloom among other projects.) Growing her own flowers was always part of the process.
“I’m an absolute sucker for ruffles,” says Hurst. Of the many different categories of iris, she homes in on tall bearded varieties — specifically modern hybrids. While historic irises and the mid-century introductions from breeders such as Cedric Morris are categorised by an elegant understatement, newer breeds are far more flouncy. And “the more ruffles they have, the better”, says Hurst.
And then there are the colours; no other flower has quite the kaleidoscopic range, from “cool” whites, blues and lilacs through to intense “hot” hues: rusty oranges and velvety reds; from the palest pinks to the richest purples. Best of all, says Hurst, are those in unusual painterly tones, such as the densely ruffled Berry Scary, with its petals of deepest violet, lavender and grey, or Downtown Brown, a cult iris whose deep copper brown segues to lilac.
The colour combinations and patterns found within a single flower can be striking, whether as bicolours (where the standard and falls are contrasting colours), bitones (which feature gradations of the same hue), plicata blooms (with stipples and other markings) and veining. Take Legerdemain, whose lower petals morph from cool lilac blue to a bruised mauve-grey, while its “beard” (the hairy strip along the inner centre of the falls) is vivid orange.
“Some of them are almost surreal,” says Hurst. She has recently self-published the Falls & Standards Full Iris Index (£18), a guide to the varieties she grows. When it comes to using them in her arrangements, “I enjoy being slightly challenged by the colours — like a really difficult kind of acid yellow that maybe you wouldn’t think would work with anything else, but then suddenly it does”, she says. “They are just endlessly inspiring.”
Now the couple has taken their obsession to the next level, with a programme of hybridisation. Starting out as plant breeders was “not complicated or difficult”, says Hurst. They taught themselves the technique by watching YouTube videos posted by other breeders, and from books.
Each year, they select the flowers they will cross, then carefully pollinate the mother plant by hand. When a seed pod has developed, those seeds are sown into trays and the seedlings transplanted into the ground. It is, she says, a hit-and-miss process: “We can have a seed pod with 15-20 seeds in it, and every single one of those seeds will produce a different flower.” Most of their new seedlings take between two and three years to flower; the most promising hybrids will be left to grow for several more years before the rhizomes are robust enough to be split into new plants.
Iris societies such as the West & Midlands Iris Group (founded in 1974), whose modus operandi is to share plant knowledge, have also been a key source of information, but the qualities they look for in plants (including tight standards and sturdier falls) differ somewhat to the more nuanced characteristics Hurst and Fletcher are searching for.
So far, they’ve created some mesmerising, as yet unnamed, blooms. One in a soft lilac brown has dramatic copper veining and flashes of acid yellow. Another favourite, in smokey lilac grey, has a bright orange beard.
For most of us, the bearded iris is a prized specimen in garden borders. Some critics question its worthiness, citing its fleeting flowering. But Hurst insists that the bearded iris season is not really that short; her earliest flowers are in April, and the last as late as mid-June, she says. Each stem has seven to nine buds, which tend to open in succession; good deadheading can prolong the flowering.
Like all the most positive-thinking gardeners, she also sees the upside of a plant that has a starring moment once a year: “It’s exciting to feel all that anticipation, and then you get to enjoy this ridiculous spectacle of insane colours and ruffles.”
But for all its flamboyance, the bearded iris is actually very low maintenance. It must have free-draining soil; as Hurst grows on damp clay soil, all of her irises are grown in raised beds that have been filled with top soil and grit. And a sunny, open spot in the garden is essential (their rhizomes, which sit just at the surface of the soil, need to be baked by summer sun). Some growers give them a low-nitrogen feed in early spring ahead of flowering, but they tend to thrive on benign neglect. “They’re incredibly drought-tolerant as well, which is amazing,” says Hurst. “We don’t ever water ours.”
Breeding her own flowers doesn’t stop her head being turned by the new cultivars arriving each season from her favourite suppliers. Nurseries start shipping iris rhizomes in July; they can be planted out anytime from the summer months into the autumn. It’s best, however, to get them in the ground by September so they can grow fresh roots before winter.
“We actually put in another order for some rhizomes from America last night,” she admits of the latest additions to her already huge collection. “So there’s going to be even more next year.”
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