19 May 2025 Photography Blooms

Our Spring Flowers Blooming Out

The arrival of spring brings vibrant blooms cultivated over many years.

Pink and White Gladiolus in Bloom (view full res)

Spring is the most beautiful time of year—especially when you’ve put so much planning and effort into specific blooming plants. As usual, our spring came and went in the blink of an eye, and now it's high humidity and high heat for the rest of the year. But we planned for flowers to bloom all year long.

Over the course of many years, we’ve cultivated several gardens with flowers that bloom from early spring—like our daffodils—all the way into late October, when our huge Confederate roses (Hibiscus mutabilis) surprise us with their big red blooms. Their arrival always marks the end of summer around here.

Several years ago, we began collecting iris bulbs from local friends who had too many or whose beds had become overgrown. We transplanted several different varieties into our garden, which have since exploded into large displays of Tall Bearded Iris and the smaller (or miniature) Siberian Iris. Then about a year ago, we dove into the world of more than 80,000 varieties of Tall Bearded Iris and began the long process of building garden beds to accommodate the ones we thought were the most vibrant and unique.

I’ve even started working on a website dedicated to our flowers. While it will mostly focus on iris bulbs, it will also feature a wide variety of other flowers and bulbs—from Cahaba lilies to gladiolus. Hopefully, the site will be ready sometime later this year. But for now, here are a few of our spring and early summer blooms.

Our Spring Flowers

Orange Matrix Asiatic Lily in Bloom in the bulb Garden (view full res)

Blue and White Hydrangea in Bloom (view full res)

Variegated Rose in Bloom (view full res)

Purple Asters in Prebloom (view full res)

Closeup of Purple Tall Bearded Iris in Bloom (view full res)

Pink and White Gladiolus in Bloom (view full res)

Purple Siberian Iris in Spring (view full res)

Small Purple Siberian Iris in Bloom (view full res)

Deborah Evaluating the Iris Blooms (view full res)

Red and White Variegated Amaryllis in Bloom (view full res)

Red Amaryllis in Spring Bloom (view full res)

Light Blue Tall Bearded Iris in Bloom (view full res)

Pink and Yellow Tall Bearded Iris in Bloom (view full res)

Yellow Iris in Spring Bloom (view full res)

For those interested in our upcoming iris bulb website, I’ll post a link once it’s ready and filled with flowers. This site has always been focused on photography in general, but my hope is that both our cycling site and our flower site will feature subject-specific photography for those interested in those topics. Much like video creators who share unique content across multiple YouTube channels, we’ve decided to do the same across multiple websites—one for cycling and travel, and another for iris bulbs. So stay tuned!