Can Irises Change Color?

Find out whether irises can change color.

Filed under: Perennials, Plants

Q. My mother's favorite flower was the iris. She gathered all her irises when she moved in with us and, with the ones that I had, she planted all of them in the front corner of my yard. Can irises change color? A friend told me that they can. This is very important to me since I want to preserve the colors she had.

A. Sometimes when there's a mixed bed containing several varieties of irises, it almost seems as if a few have changed color, but they haven't. Once a lavender, always a lavender. Irises remain true to their hue and, because they are such long-lived perennials, that color stays around for decades.

The reasons why an iris bed sometimes appear to have changed color (but hasn't):

A particularly vigorous variety could have crowded out a weaker form;

Moving some of the irises could have resulted in a cut rhizome of one type winding up in a collection of some others.

If one iris is crossed with another, the offspring will be different colors, just as with anything else. But the offspring will be distinct and separate plants, and the parent plants will remain the same.