Surprise Late-Blooming Light Purple Iris

This year has been, for us anyway, all about the Iris Bulb garden. We built a massive set of garden beds this summer, see Making 40 Raised Beds for Fall Iris Bulbs and Progress Update on Raised Iris Bed Construction if you are interested in some garden box building insanity. This was all for a large order of Iris Bulbs (at least large for us) we placed in February 2025, which arrived early August.

Our long term goals for that garden started back in 2022 when we broke ground with this post Transforming Our Backyard into a Vegetable Garden, although we didn't know at the time it would be an Iris heaven. The work continued through this entire summer, even through the intense heat we have here. We decided early on we were going to document the whole process over on its own website at dig.garden so you can head over there if you're interested. The great thing about the garden now is the back braking work of building the infrastructure is more or less done for the season, and we can walk through our hard work and pull weeds and watch the bulbs grow.

We ordered several bulbs of each color, approximately 65 or so different varieties (colors), and for the most part they have been planted in the ground now for about a month or two. Most of them have already grown quite nicely. Especially since we literally received no rain in September and the temps were almost unbearable.

Photographing Iris Bulbs

To our surprise, we had one bloom out last week in amazing color, but the wrong color. This particular variety was supposed to be purple and white, and turned out to be a light purple and light purple, with a yellow beard. If you are interested in how I photograph some of these bulbs I did a post a while back explaining the focus stack process at How to Use Focus Stacking for Macro Photography although the images in this post were more or less point and shoot because of the sun and heat that day.

For me and my photography, having a garden full of unique and amazing flowers is going to be a dream come true next Spring. Even our other gardens this Spring were pretty incredible, see Our Spring Flowers Blooming Out for some Spring flowers from this year. But Iris blooms make for amazing photos because of the unique nuances of color from the thousands of varieties available out there. So I can't wait for next Spring. This one just decided it wanted to be photographed this year. The sun wasn't cooperating this day for photos, but I still love how the blooms turned out.

Light Purple Iris Blooms

The super long term plan for this garden is to be able to share or sell some of the bulbs as they mature and multiply. Since this one was clearly not classified correctly when we bought it, we can't sell it as the variety name we thought, so it now becomes a "NoID" iris where we basically name it whatever we want and can't claim the lineage. So eventually next spring this one will become Light Purple NoID Bearded Iris on the shop. Still amazingly beautiful, just a generic beauty.

It does look like we will have one more super-late blooming Iris this summer, one called Immortality. This one was just starting to show some buds and the Immortality Iris Bulb is an all white bloom. I'll post some new photos if and when that one decides to show before fall arrives.

Featured Image