I have a lot of iris, and after the storms we’ve had in the past couple of days, a lot of the flower stems were bent over or broken. Since another storm system will be arriving any minute, I thought I might as well go out and cut the broken ones for the house.
Hey look – they even coordinate with the painting in the background. I totally planned that. *Ahem*. I have a few other colors of iris, but since they were in good shape, I didn’t cut them.
By the way, if any of you locals want some of the dark purple ones in the center, or the light purple and gold ones, I’ll be thinning the herd this year – just let me know. I can’t seem to give them away faster than they grow.
Now for a more serious subject – the declining bee population, and the threat to the world food supply.
CarrieK posted about it on her blog, with a link to SaveHoneyBees.org, which is working to increase the population of healthy honey bees in the world. They don’t raise the bees to harvest the honey commercially, and they don’t ship them across the country for commercial pollination, as many beekeepers do. Their focus is simply to raise healthy bees, which can be used for research and breeding.
Please consider making a donation to this or another bee organization of your choice – I’m sure there are many others.
While I don’t have the time or space for a beehive, I am considering making some sort of insect house, to help encourage other kinds of bees in my garden. Here are lots more for inspiration.
CabledSheep 
I have a phobia about those insect house things – they look so repellent to me I can hardly stand it. Pretty flowers, though.
New hives were introduced to the garden by the beekeeper who lost 80% of his bees last winter. Hearing about his problems first hand is very troubling. Hopefully we will save the tiny saviors of our planet.
Lovely Irises! You must plant a lot!
Hopefully urban beekeeping becomes more of a thing – I dated a guy 10+ years ago who had bees, but he had to keep them in a suburb because it wasn’t allowed in Minneapolis.
Iris run in herds? 😀 Here, I’ve seen far more bees this spring than wasps and hornets. Usually, it is the other way around. I was quite surprised. Of course, in TX, they could be killer bees, so I don’t know how this is going to play out.
I wish I had time for a hive…
Lovely irises!
In another live, I had far too many of them. No one warned me that 1 momma has 6 babies before dying and that those 6 babies grow up to be mommas with babies of their own. There was something VERY satisfying about filling those green waste cans with those little suckers once all my friends were irised out. *L*
I love your Flower Art display! So coordinated. So well planned. So pretty.
Thanks for posting the links! It’s a little scary how much impact we have with so little thought.
The bee deaths are terrifying, aren’t they?
We’d love some irises. We’re thinning ours, too, but we’re planning on spreading them to the side yard, and in more clumps on the front lawn, then turning the irrigation off.