With so many gorgeous varieties of bearded iris available, it's hard to know where to begin. Enter professional gardener Peg Aloi for a list of her favorites.

The iris is the birth flower of February, the month in which I was born. The Dwarf Lake Iris is the state wildflower of Michigan, where I’m from. There is an iris named “Clarence,” the most handsome ...

Irises, in a way, are like men: They come in all shapes and sizes; some are bearded, and others aren’t. The colorful perennial will soon begin popping up and flowering in gardens throughout central ...

As a child growing up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I thought irises were part of the orchid family because their blooms were just as spectacular and exotic. I would find native irises ...

If you don't grow irises, or have only a couple of old ones that were in the garden when you moved in, it's easy to dismiss them from today's plant palette. After all, most of them bloom only once, ...

Bearded irises have come a long way from the simple Iris pallida fondly called “Grandma’s flags” and grown in so many gardens many decades ago. Named for the Goddess of the Rainbow in Greek mythology, ...

These statuesque beauties, resilient to drought, come in all colors and scents, even vanilla and root beer. This spring, I have to admit, I went a little berserk about bearded iris. The combination of ...

Here is a riddle -- what flower has facial hair? A bearded iris. This is the season for that beautiful perennial flower to shine in all its colorful, old-fashioned glory. Iris is named after the Greek ...

Critics of bearded irises say the flowers are too fleeting, their lives too short, that they bloom for a few brief weeks in spring, then are gone until the next season. Further, they maintain, the ...

If you like your flowers plain and simple, the bearded iris is not for you. It is hard to say which aspect of the iris is the most ornate: its range and mixes of colors, its frills, its size or its ...