GARDENING / The iris troubles: a modest proposal: Iris breeders grow their giant blooms purely to amaze one another. Mary Keen suggests they try a less esoteric approach

HERE COMES a sinister quotation from a scholarly monograph on irises: 'Scientific developments in hybridising have led to some remarkable changes. As an example, by the use of colchicine, tetraploid Siberian Irises have been produced which are twice the size of the normal. They are virtually a man-made species and, in an age of test-tube babies, who knows what will happen next?'

That was 10 years ago and the Frankenstein iris is now here to stay. At one of my favourite nurseries, Bernwode Plants, Judy Tolman was emphatic that they never get asked for irises. Nobody, she says, wants to grow them any more. Can the fact that the average gardener seems to have lost interest be put down to the appearance of the giant test-tube iris?

Abandoned to hobby breeders and hybridisers, who develop flowers less for gardeners than to amaze one another, a race of giant blooms in weird colour breaks is being produced each year. Many of these have originated from the United States, where they do things bigger. There, irises are a million-dollar business. I can see it must be fun to engineer seven-inch flowers that have pink petals above, and purple below, streaked with orange and fringed with brown on a stem four feet tall. But for most gardeners this is a non-starter.

At Chelsea in May this year I spent some time at the Kelways stand where they specialise in irises and peonies. I looked in vain for a lemon-yellow, one-coloured flower, or for something like that old friend 'Jane Phillips' in summer sky blue. The newer irises in shades of peach and apricot and brown and mustard, were, I was told, much more reliable. I was shown their larger and stiffer flowers that will stand up to rain, but like paintings which can only be hung in galleries they seemed hardly domesticated enough to take home.

Peter Maynard of the British Iris Society says that several thousand new irises are registered each year. But, in garden trials conducted jointly by his organisation and the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley, only 10 or 12 are pronounced fit enough to be recommended as garden plants. He suggests that the tall bearded irises are not for the average plot, because they need staking. The intermediates which flower in May and have fewer blooms than the big boys are, he thinks, the ones we should choose.

'Stepping Out' is one of his favourites. Top of the pops in the United States since 1967, this is a two-tone white and violet number, strong and long-flowering. Others he recommends are 'Titan's Glory', 'Jane Phillips' (of course) and a new one called 'Early Light'.

One of the perceived drawbacks to irises is that they flower only once, but we do not hold this against other flowers - besides, irises come at that in-between season after spring and before the roses start. However, if breeders would devote their energies to perfecting the remontant iris (that is one that gives a second performance) rather than to tinkering with the number of flowers and colour schemes, ordinary gardeners might take to them again.

Mr Maynard says firmly that remontant irises can be a great disappointment. Unless they are fed and watered between bouts of flowering, they do not remont. They also need to be divided more often than those that flower once. 'Anyway,' he adds, 'who wants an iris in flower at Christmas? They look horrible and wet with fewer blooms spread out.'

I got the impression that asking iris specialists to produce the flowers gardeners want is not encouraged. But Peter Maynard did suggest that I speak to Claire Austen of David Austen's Nursery, who is responsible for their herbaceous plants. She was more enthusiastic about remontants, which she has been importing for several years.

Trained at art school, she seemed aware of the problems of using modern multicoloured irises in mixed borders, and her list is thoroughly tempting. 'Just Jennifer' (a white), 'Lemon Tree' (the elusive yellow), 'Godfrey Owen' (another new yellow) and 'Annabel Jane' (a soft lavender) sound like irises I want to grow. Austen's lists a few remontants that may be worth a try.

John Metcalf of Four Seasons Nursery, a plantsman who can be relied on for sound advice, was - like Peter Maynard - doubtful about remontants. 'They are,' he said, 'a hazardous expectancy.' He lists several garden- worthy irises which have strong constitutions and are less prone to the bacterial spot that can plague the leaves of weaker plants in spring. The 'selfs' - or one-colour irises - are in short supply, but there are two white ones, 'Winter Olympics' and 'Avenello', and a blue called 'River Patrol' that sound tempting.

Bearded irises have always been flowers that attract painters and lovers of beauty. Cedric Morris grew and bred his own, which he passed on to Sissinghurst and to Beth Chatto. Elizabeth Blackadder paints them often and, in the best garden I have seen this year, two young painters have planted masses. In one place they had put dark purple and smoky irises with alliums and pink-and-green fantasy tulips, among cloudy nepeta and the crimson thistle Cirsium rivulare atropurpureum.

I suspect most gardeners, although they may not be as imaginative as John and Fiona Owen of Chalford, Stroud, would like to combine irises with other plants. For this, most of the two- and three-tone flowers are not so suitable. We covet their rainbow colours, but not all in the same flower. Fiona confesses that she

rarely uses irises with more than one colour in the flower.

When asked for names of her favourites, she mentioned 'Cleo' and 'Storm'. Neither of these is recorded in The Plant Finder (Moorland Publishing Company pounds 9.99) - a sad sign that the quantity of new plants is so overwhelming that many of the most attractive are dropped after a season or two.

All bearded irises like sun and good drainage and are best divided every three years. They do not need to have their leaves chopped off after flowering, as old gardeners used to do. The fans of green can go on making a useful shape in the flowerbed if all the dead leaves are removed - and if, towards the end of a wet summer, the tips of the leaves brown, then these can be cut off. Because the rhizomes need sun, irises cannot be overgrown by other later flowers unless they are very airy. Linum perenne, the blue flax, is about right as a neighbour of a bearded iris.-