My favorite flower
When I was six, I was playing near our neighbor's horse pasture when I saw the most beautiful flower I'd ever seen just on the other side of the fence. It seemed huge, and to me incredibly exotic. We didn't have flowers in the yard, so my experience was mainly with dandelions, daisies, black-eyes susans, and the occasional rose. It smelled heavenly: light and sunny, not overpowering like a rose. I ran to tell my mother; when I said it was purple, she first thought I meant a thistle and told me not to prick myself. But I dragged her away from making dinner to see it, and she said, "Oh yeah, those were growing by the house when we moved in." Apparently my father didn't want to mow around them or something, so he dug them up and tossed them into the field, out of his way. There they had taken root again, probably multiplied until they were too crowded to bloom for the most part, and finally that year created one bloom, like an SOS, which I received.
My brother, a wise 13, was old enough to know what they were called and to have some idea how divide the rhizomes, so he spaced them out along the fence row, every five feet or so. Over the years, they thrived so much they were re-divided many times, finally planted every couple of feet along the entire fence row along one side of an acre, however long that is. I went back during college, sometime in the mid-90s, and dug up a bunch to pack in my suitcase and plant up here in Massachusetts. Some might be outside my old apartment in Brighton; others are presumably still growing in the yard at the duplex I lived in in Quincy. They multiply so quickly there was no reason to dig up each and every one when I moved.
Over the years, I've acquired other varieties: some I've bought, some I've dug up from a friend's house. They are all bigger and showier, in fancier colors. Some have such large flowers that they have to be staked or they fall over under their own weight. Not these. The pale petals flop like bunny ears, making me think of lace handkerchiefs, quaint and delicate. They bloom earlier than the others, and they have more scent, though not enough to be cloying; you have to bend close to smell it.
Walking home last week, I noticed that the same type of iris is growing outside my condo building, which was built about the same time as the house I grew up in in the late '40s. I wonder how many World War II vets and their wives moved into new homes, with help from the first GI Bill, and planted the same irises, and whether they were imagining them still blooming some 65 years later.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/37759.html. Feel free to comment there
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My brother, a wise 13, was old enough to know what they were called and to have some idea how divide the rhizomes, so he spaced them out along the fence row, every five feet or so. Over the years, they thrived so much they were re-divided many times, finally planted every couple of feet along the entire fence row along one side of an acre, however long that is. I went back during college, sometime in the mid-90s, and dug up a bunch to pack in my suitcase and plant up here in Massachusetts. Some might be outside my old apartment in Brighton; others are presumably still growing in the yard at the duplex I lived in in Quincy. They multiply so quickly there was no reason to dig up each and every one when I moved.
Over the years, I've acquired other varieties: some I've bought, some I've dug up from a friend's house. They are all bigger and showier, in fancier colors. Some have such large flowers that they have to be staked or they fall over under their own weight. Not these. The pale petals flop like bunny ears, making me think of lace handkerchiefs, quaint and delicate. They bloom earlier than the others, and they have more scent, though not enough to be cloying; you have to bend close to smell it.
Walking home last week, I noticed that the same type of iris is growing outside my condo building, which was built about the same time as the house I grew up in in the late '40s. I wonder how many World War II vets and their wives moved into new homes, with help from the first GI Bill, and planted the same irises, and whether they were imagining them still blooming some 65 years later.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/37759.html. Feel free to comment there
comments