Father's Day

I remember sitting in my third grade desk staring at the teacher who kept smiling at me...I think it was Ms. Haney. She hardly ever smiled. She would look at you through her bug eyed glasses and make you feel shivers down your spine. The class got quiet because we felt impending doom. She stood up and pointed at the door still staring at me and I thought "Oh no! What have I done!" I turned around and there was my father. Tall, handsome in his uniform he held his arms out to me and I all but burst out of that chair. He had been gone for 3 years to Vietnam. Fathers have flaws, they are people like any one else. They make mistakes and as we grow older we realize that we do too. Today I remember that little girl and how her father made her feel. Even though he is gone now I still remember that moment. I love you Daddy years don't change that.

Plots, Pans and Garbage Pails

I have been plotting for most of the spring to get these iris into something other than a bright blue Kiddie pool. They were given to me by a lady who bought them and then found out her ground was mostly tree roots. We managed to get them home and drag them under the grape arbor...then we collapsed for the sheer weight of moving them! I have made plots and put things in pans, garbage pails but never a kiddie pool! I choose to dig when it's damp for red clay because though it is heavy as crap and dense you can dig and it holds it's shape like a clay pot...you just have to make sure you make a way for the water to get out or it'll drown your plants. Just like a pot with no hole in the bottom!
I have this thing about iris...they seduce me every time I see one. J and I have bought Denim blue, Damask purples, Immortality white, as well as inherited palest apricot from my grandmothers.  Now we are searching for a black iris called Old Black Magic which is a re blooming iris! So here are the pics of whats blooming for the week...Blessings and prayers!

Life Began in a Garden

As you grow you start rethinking things. I like to think of gardening as an art form. It is painting with plants, therapy with soil! Gardening is a very forgiving medium of art.  You can have failure after failure and begin with a clean canvas every time. Dig it up plant something else, somewhere else. Get plants from all your family and become the historian.  Some people like a garden that's one color and minimum ornamentation, some like masses of color and structures. I happen to like color! ALL of it! I haven't yet met a plant I didn't fall in love with. It adds to your life in so many ways. I have learned to talk to people! Did you know I have not met a gardener who didn't like talking about what they did how they did it? They are the most caring and sharing people I have ever met! Want to start a conversation ask someone about a flower or plant and see their eyes light up!
I have also learned that we need to be good stewards of this small earth. Little things matter! That everything you do has repercussions. Want to teach a child to be responsible? Begin in the garden! 

Immortality Iris....The story of forever.

I am a plant addict. There, I said it. No intervention needed! 

I love the smell of freshly cut grass, deep down to the brown, red & black earth and the feel of it between my fingers. I love hearing stories about plants. There is lore and fact, and sometimes they intermingle. I love sitting out in my garden, listening to the birds sing; viewing it as art, like, a great masterpiece, and the work yet undone. 

The story of iris flowers began when Egypt conquered Syria, King Thutmose III of Egypt was a gardener and a warrior as well. He assured that the iris flower would be on his monuments, Temple of Amon at Karnak, as well as in the gardens of Egypt, they all bear the iris design, and are the symbol for life renewed. 

The white iris was created by Dr. Lloyd Zurbrigg, circa 1991,  which is known today as the Immortality Iris, which blooms in the Spring and in the Fall, which is unusual for an iris. It's has been called a true remembrance of this remarkable man.  I love to think of it as a little chunk of his own immortality.

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  {This photo was taken two weeks later}

I have been promised the re-blooming will go on for perhaps as long as 6 weeks! 

History of the Iris Flower | Garden Guides

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