Japanese Iris

Japanese Iris
Iris ensata ‘Activity’
(EYE-ris) (en-SA-tuh)

The Japanese Iris are blooming. Well they are trying to bloom. There was a really nice dark purple Japanese Iris blooming at work and by the time I got around to taking a picture of it is was getting totally beat up by the rain. I doubt I could’ve captured the richness and vividness of the electric purple color of the flowers even if the weather had been nice. The day before the sun was hitting it and it looked kind of blue, purple and black.

We had a huge line of thunderstorms move through yesterday afternoon. It affected other parts of Connecticut worse than my area in the southwest. I have all the locations of the various gardens I tend to on basically street level radar. If you use weather.com and go to your local area and then the weather in motion link to zoom to US addresses for the radar. So as the storms progressed I could see what was happening at each house.

There was this light pink Japanese Iris blooming at work. It really had the subtlest shadings of color. Its flowers were smaller than the dark purple Iris but still good sized.


The first Japanese Iris picture posted is the cultivar “Activity’. It was blooming at the nursery when I was picking up the Daylilies. I would have bought it but it had actually already almost totally flowered so I couldn’t justify the price. The purple veining on the flower always gets me. It grows to about 30 inches tall.

Japanese Iris has been posted here before. Use the label button to see those posts.