Good bye and good riddence evil yellow flag irises..

There's a funny (well, funny now) story about these plants I bid a gleeful farewell to. I had gotten them from someone who worked at Chaves years ago. I had thought they were kind of cool because they were supposed to have yellow flowers and had variegated leaves. They never did well...they just kind of languished in my soil at both the Coast Guard house and now this house. Last year, it dawned on my what they were - Yellow Flag Iris which are a water plant. Cool, right? I figured I'll put them in pots and throw them into Lake Larson. Since they were in a pot, they can't spread....right??

Well, let me tell you, they were very happy in Lake Larson. They grew to almost 5' tall. 5' tall plants in little 12" diameter pots fall over...a lot. I spent most of last summer righting these stupid things where they sitting on the pond liner. We had some near the large flat rock we stand on to feed the fish and they were in the view path of Deckzilla. I never, ever expected to grow like they were on steroids and boy, did they look dumb there.

After two years of having them annoy me with their brazen growth and they started to break the pots, I felt it was time to go on to a better place (like my compost bin, for example.) Eric was a sweet guy and started to remove them from the pond when he was doing a spring clean up. All of them he removed on his own until he got to the ones by the feeding rock and this is what he had to battle -


**gasp**

It took the both of us to get that out of the pond...the roots had grabbed a hold of every rock it could reach. Within that mess is one 12" pot and a little 4" pot...those two pots produced Frankeniris. Now, I see very clearly why CT and MA both have this plant on their invasive plant lists. They did this in my pond in pots, could you imagine what this could do to a natural pond or lake. You would have nothing by iris in a very short matter of time.