In honor of Iris Week here at ATP, I thought it might be fun to share how we fell in love with (became addicted to) Irises.
I'll start!
When I was eleven years old, my parents bought their first-ever house. We had lived in a beautiful old home, which my parents had rented for years, in an established neighborhood/town. Because they were renters, my father did not do any plantings there, except for a vegetable garden.
The house that they bought was the first block of a coming neighborhood, built out in the middle of cornfields and prairies in the far-west area of Chicago. It was here that my father's green thumb developed, as landscaping was started from scratch. He planted grass, trees, hedges -- you name it -- as well as flower beds with roses and other blooming plants, including a couple of Irises. It was the first time that I'd ever seen an Iris.
During the carefree days of youth, my brother and I would take bicycle excursions out into the prairies and pretend that we were explorers. Actually, we were!
On one such excursion, we came across the foundation of a long-gone farm house. Growing happily next to the foundation stones was a clump of Irises -- the color of which I had never seen before. My father's Irises were plain purple -- and these were two-toned: tan up (standards) and maroon down (falls). I was so excited and couldn't wait for my father to get home from work that day so I could tell him about my exciting find.
When I told him about the Iris, and where it was, he grabbed a shovel and put it in the car -- and me -- and we drove out to where the old homestead had been. There were the beautiful Irises growing out in the middle of nowhere, just like I had said. He dug up the clump, brought it home, and planted it in his garden.
It was a beautiful old Iris -- and I was very proud that I had been the one to discover it. I waited for it to bloom every spring. My love for Irises was born at that time and has never left me. I so wish that I had a rhizome of that Iris today and I wonder if it truly was as beautiful as it seemed to me back then -- way back in 1956!!!
