Winter-flowering Algerian Irises

If you pick the stalk of an unopened flower close to ground level, from amongst the long, grassy, evergreen leaves, and bring the bud inside, the flower will open quickly in the warmth and reward you with a sweetly-scented flower which will last for a day or two.


Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it often breeds a shrivelling carelessness. Some of the very best flowers for my garden are under my very nose, yet I cannot see for looking. When I consider how beautiful are the flowers of the ‘Algerian iris’, Iris unguicularis, and how accommodating it is once established, I feel ashamed that I have it growing in only one place in the garden, and scarcely give it a thought from one end of the year to the other. Until it comes into flower, that is, and then, just for a brief moment, I realise how lucky I am.

This carelessness has nothing to do with its rather off-putting scientific name. In any event, for most of my formative years, this ‘beardless’ iris was known as Iris stylosa, a name both memorable and perfectly easy to say. I think it is because the Algerian iris is one of those plants that requires no song and dance from the gardener, no exhausting feeding or pruning regime, in fact nothing special at all.

It comes from countries that bound the Mediterranean, so it is accustomed to hot dry summers, and cool, wetter winters (which is why it flowers when it does) and emphatically does not need a rich soil. Provided you can find, or make, an area of infertile, very gritty, preferably limey soil in a south-facing border (say against the house wall), you have solved its cultivation problems more or less permanently. If it does not flower well one year, it is much more likely to be because the summer before was dreary and sunless than because the clump is overcrowded.

So what is it like, this paragon of beauty thriving on neglect? It has flowers between 5 and 8 cm across when fully open, at the top of 15 cm, smooth stalks. Inside, the three ‘falls’ (the petals which curve over) are hairless, light purple, but with the most delicate mauve feathering on a yellow background near the base; these lines might have been painted by an oriental artist of infinite skill.

The three ‘standards’ are also light purple. The exterior of the petals, however, has the ivory pallor of a consumptive and is thin enough for a hint of the feathering to show through. You only see all that properly, though, when the flower is in bud and tightly furled like an umbrella.

If you pick the stalk of an unopened flower close to ground level, from amongst the long, grassy, evergreen leaves, and bring the bud inside, the flower will open quickly in the warmth and reward you with a sweetly-scented flower which will last for a day or two. This is certainly the best way of examining the flower, or painting it, if you are so inclined.

Flowers begin to unfurl in my garden clump in the last days of December, and though each flower lasts only a few days, there is a succession of them well into February. The exact timing of flowering depends where in its geographical range the ancestors of your plant was found. It may be as early as the autumn or as late as February. It pays to put one or two slug pellets around the base of the flowers under the leaves where animals won’t find them; otherwise, you may find that the flowers are a bit tatty when they do unfurl.

There is a white-flowered form called ‘Alba’ and a dwarf sub-species called I. cretensis. There are two named selections, which are quite widely sold. The first, ‘Mary Barnard’, is even more beautiful because the colour is a deeper, richer, more luxuriant purple. The second, which is much paler, and to my mind a little wishy-washy, is called ‘Walter Butt’, and has shorter, broader foliage. It is probably the most scented. If anyone ever offers you either of these, though, take their hands off.

The best time to replant the rhizomes (roots) is September, as soon as the autumn rains have started; they should be put in the soil a little deeper than you would the rhizomes of ‘bearded’ irises, and in as large pieces as you can manage. If you are lucky, they will flower in their first winter – and never disappoint you in the winters thereafter.

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