I have mine scattered amongst roses, perrenials, bulbs & annuals according to eye-pleasing color combos. I don't plant the same color iris next to each other - to prevent mix-ups with IDing.

If I have one that doesn't look well in its location I'll take a bloom & wire it to a bamboo stake. Then I poke it around in different beds to see where it should live.

I do plant intermediate beardeds toward the front. The tall beardeds vary in height each year depending upon rainfall & temps.

I have mine all mixed in as well, and use the same process that irisgal does for moving them around. Thank goodness they are easy to transplant, or I'd be in real trouble!

I can never remember what blooms when, how tall they get, and the colors are always a little different than the photos, so moving things around has worked out best.

Renee

At the moment I am in the random placement camp. Don't be surprised that the colors are not as vivid as the catalogs, that's a photoshop thing.
I did notice that the Iris in Leslie Painters garden (Napa Valley gardens) seemed especially vivid, maybe something in their soil.
Iris flowers near the coast (i.e. Santa Cruz) seem to expand with the moderate weather and are larger than "normal". Often my rebloomers seem more vivid in the fall, color and temperature are probably related.
I have tried to re-create a "stream" of iris using different varieties of the same color type randomly placed - say whites, pale blues,blues and dark blue-black. If you look up Monet's Garden (I have the book) there is a stunning border done this way with purple aubrieta edging in front and backed with red poppies....

Chad

LOL...like the rest of my gardens, in rows.

I am currently living in a house that has a city lot of about 4000 sq feet. Most of the area is taken up by the house, a garage and a 10 ft by 100 ft long driveway. Around the house is what I refer to as a cement apron (about 2 feet wide) and 2 cement pathways, 1 to the front door, 1 to the side door.

So, I've got too many daylilies lined up like soldiers against the wooden fence that abutts the driveway, then more in the backyard in the sunniest spot I could make the bed.

My iris were supposed to be interplanted amongst the daylilies but I ended up widening the bed and putting them in neat rows. Last years arrivals from Shreiners had nice color tags so I took a piece of paper, and stapled the tags to the paper in the order I planted them. I'm going to label them this year as I was ordering markers for them last year.

I plan to get a picture of Ulalena tomorrow. Missed the first 2 flowers due to rain.

Thanks for all the information! I'm glad to hear that other gardeners move their irises around!

And, thanks for confirming the size difference/color difference seen on the internet. Although even when I've tried to take my own photos, the photos seem more vibrant, even without Photoshop! LOL!

I've been keeping good records in a Garden journal. Made of map of where things are planted, and I've been recording size, bloom color and date of first open flower. Should help out in the Fall when I plan to redo the beds.

One last thing, do you all plant all your early bloomers together, late bloomers together, etc, or do you intermingle those as well? I'm unsure whether it looks better to have a mass of blooms at one time in separate areas, or if it looks nice to have a few blooms all around the bed.

By the way, I mostly planted reblooming irises. The iris don't get any sun in winter for a few weeks, and then limited sun in the spring. Summer will be a lot of sun. I figured I'd try the rebloomers hoping to get at least one bloom out of them!

These irises are becoming an addiction!

Barbara

Go to the Gallery and look at Renee's pictures. Love her gardens.

As I have said, pretty much all of the garden is separated by plant type only because I don't have the space. I really need to redo my beds but since I don't envision this stay to last much longer, I'm waiting as I'm hoping to move them with me to a final and hopefully, permanent home with twice as much space. oh, but that really didn't answer your question. Right now must of my SDB and TB's are interplanted (just happened to work that way when the orders arrived). I'll take some pictures today as Ulalena, Little Sighs and Forever Blue are blooming today.

Renee (again) would probably be a good source as to what does well in CA although I've read that CA has many USDA zones.

Anyhow, I'm including some links of iris nurseries. I've ordered from Sutton and Schriener in the past and have been very pleased. Actually, I had a TB iris from Shriener that didn't survive the winter and I email as to what their policy was. They told me that they'd ship me a replacement in July. Very kind of them.

I've placed orders with Napa iris (http://www.napairis.com/) and Aitken's Salmon Creek Garden (https://www.flowerfantasy.net/shop/) It's an addiction. I have a daylily and iris addiction. :)

Ha! Ha! Ha! Organize. That must be different than desperately fitting them in by the height they are supposed to grow. Which is all I do. Then find out it ain't necessarily so.

But they are so pretty, It's okay. I do keep charts of all I've planted, though..

kay

When I started buying iris I put them in a nice little bed all there own. Then Superstion took over alot of the bed so I started moving iris around in my other beds trying to give each one more room to grow before crowding its neighbors out. So right now I guess I have them stuck where ever they fit.

I first tried to group them by bloom time. That is planted all the early bloomers at one end of the bed and late blomers at the opposite. I gave up on that. Now I just plant them making sure two of exactly the same do not come in a row. So no two yellows together for instance. Otherwise, I don't care. I like a jumble of colors. In fact to me grouping by colors doesn't look as good as mixing up the colors. And I love lots of color.

Right now, they're just in rows in alphabetical order grouped by who we bought them from. Which does make it easier to figure out what's what when we lose the markers. A few are scattered around the yard. But I really want to arrange some in a spectrum. If a bunch of the ones I have bloom at the same time, I'll probably try it, but I just won't have a green, which would throw the entire thing off, but I'm sure someday, there'll be a nice green one.

I tried grouping them by thier bloom times but find I like it best if I have them blooming at different times in all the beds that way I have iris to enjoy in each bed for a longer time. I have also noticed that mine don,t bloom when they are supposed to. I had several early bloomers blooming in june last year so they were closer to late than early.