Front Porch: Late iris project pays off in blooms, Pettit says

I have come late to the delights of gardening, as my friends know. And I think that some of them, including a Master Gardener or two, are kindly amused at my discoveries and expressions of wonder at what I keep learning. At my advanced age.

I’ve come a long way from way back when, when as a young newlywed and standing in my mother-in-law’s garden in Eagle River, Alaska, she asked me how I liked her shooting stars. In that she was looking downward and not up into the sky, I assumed she was talking flowers. I could recognize a rose and a daisy and probably a tulip, but that was pretty much it.

As a newly minted daughter-in-law, I didn’t want to appear hopelessly clueless to my raised-on-a-farm mother-in-law, so I looked in the general direction she was looking in and offered, “Oh, the color is lovely.” I think I got away with it.

But such is the ignorance of a city girl, or at least this particular city girl. As time went by, I enjoyed putting in shrubs here and there at my house, and I’d hang a geranium or two in a basket from the deck. And that pretty well-scratched my gardening itch.

But slowly things changed, and I started paying attention – but more importantly, getting curious and enjoying. We have deer where we live, so that has to be considered. Sandy soil, steep inclines, lots of rocks, shade and still marginal knowledge. But I have friends (cue the Master Gardeners) and the ability to research. And, while there’s still a lot I don’t know, I have arrived at a point where I think I’ve expanded sufficiently, enjoyed the process, and done what I’m going to do yardwise.

But apparently not.

Last July I saw my husband chatting with a neighbor out by our curb and next to a pickup truck I didn’t recognize. Bruce called me outside, and Mrs. Wang introduced me to her friends in the truck. They had just sold their home on Spokane’s North Side, and the new owners were planning to tear out the flower garden, giving the sellers the opportunity to dig up and remove anything they wanted.

They had a pickup load of irises, big clumps of irises. Mrs. Wang took some and was now taking her friends to neighbors asking if they’d like some, too. I’m not sure that I did, but it was apparent that the iris distributors really wanted to share their bounty, so I said, “Sure.”

What color and varieties did I want? I had no idea, since I knew nothing about irises, except that I could at least recognize an iris when I saw one – see, progress. So I said that a nice little mix of things would be good, and a mix of big leafy clumpy rhizomes then became mine.

So what to do with them? Google knows all, and so I went online. Seems one doesn’t just plop the clumps into holes in the ground. There’s work to do – as all of you who know this stuff are now laughing at me about. Poor Bruce, who wanted nothing to do with this, got drafted into helping separate and trim and then prepare the ground.

Ah, the ground. The only place available in the front yard, which is the only place that gets watered, is under some pine trees and amid rocks on a pretty noticeable slope. Not the most ideal spot. My balance is not ideal either, so I needed help getting these puppies placed. Cue the husband.

Even though we had directions to go by, we were still not sure we knew what we were doing. So we thought that, well, they’d either live or die, the deer would either eat them or they wouldn’t, they’d either produce flowers or they wouldn’t. Good luck to you, little rhizomes.

And then this spring we saw growth. Some tall, some not, but then, that’s what you get with “a nice little mix of things.” And lo and behold, in time, flowers! At the very end of May, some purple and yellow flowers appeared on some of the tall stems and a few of the medium-sized ones. About half of what we had transplanted only produced sword-shaped leaves, but I’m told that’s not uncommon in the first year.

And they are delightful. I thought I was done with new gardening projects. Ha.

Back in 1386 none other than Geoffery Chaucer, considered the Father of English Literature, put a proverb into print in his “The Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, Canterbury Tales,” in which he wrote “For bet than never is late.”

Or as we say today – better late than never.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by e-mail at upwindsailor@comcast.net.