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Lucille's Irises Tall bearded irises from my mother's Springfield garden, 1958 – 1996, still blooming in mine Her Garden · Mother's Irises (the catalog) · Divisions for Postage
My name is Nancy Wildes. I'm 59, I live in Bloomington, Illinois, and I retired last year after twenty-eight years as a title clerk at an abstract and title company. My mother, Lucille Alessi, grew and bred tall bearded irises in her backyard in Springfield for thirty-eight years. She registered fourteen irises of her own with the American Iris Society. When she died in 1996, at 84, I dug up about a hundred and forty of her rhizomes and brought them home with me, because I couldn't stand the thought of anybody mowing them over. I am not the gardener she was. But they're blooming, every May, and so this page is partly a memorial to her and partly a way to share what she made with people who'll love it. Mother Mother was born in Springfield in 1912 and lived there her whole life. She was a seamstress. For forty years she did alterations and dressmaking from a back bedroom in our house, wedding gowns and prom dresses and choir robes and hems, hundreds and hundreds of hems, and half of the brides in our parish were married in a dress she made. She could look at a woman across a church and tell you her measurements to the half inch. My father, Ted, worked for the railroad, and he said he married her because she was the only girl in Springfield who could mend his overalls so you couldn't see it. In the spring of 1958 our parish had a plant sale, and a lady from church was selling iris rhizomes out of a bushel basket for a quarter apiece. Mother bought a dozen. I was eighteen and I remember her planting them along the back fence with an old table knife. She said she just liked the colors. By 1960 she had joined the American Iris Society, by 1962 she had turned half the backyard into iris beds, and by 1965 Dad had given up on the idea of a lawn entirely. He built her the beds, and a bench to sit on, and he never once complained, though he did call himself "the iris widower." Dad died in 1983. Mother kept on alone for thirteen more years, out there every morning in May with her coffee and her notebook. She was still making crosses the spring before she died. How She Made a New Iris People sometimes don't realize that every named iris began as a cross somebody made by hand. Here is how Mother did it. I watched her do it a thousand times, and I've started doing it myself, badly.
The flower. A tall bearded iris has three upright petals on top called the standards and three that hang down
called the falls. The fuzzy strip down the middle of each fall is the beard. Arching over each fall is a little
petal-like arm called the style arm, and on the underside of it, near the tip, is a small flap called the stigmatic lip.
That's where the pollen has to go. Under each style arm is an anther, which holds the pollen.
The cross. Early on a dry May morning, before the bees were up, she would choose two irises she wanted to combine. With a pair of tweezers from her sewing basket she'd pull an anther from the one she'd chosen as the father, the pollen parent, and brush the pollen across the stigmatic lip of the mother, the pod parent, all three lips. Then she'd snap off the falls of the pod parent so the bees wouldn't bother it, and tie a little paper tag around the stem with the cross written on it, mother's name first: Teddy's Blue X Wabash, 5/22. Some years she made sixty crosses. Most of them didn't take. The pods. The ones that took swelled up into green seed pods about the size of a walnut. In late July or August they turn tan and begin to split, and that's when Mother slipped a small paper bag over each one and tied it shut, so that when it opened the seeds would fall into the bag and not into the dirt. Then she'd bring the bags in and line them up on the kitchen windowsill, each one labeled, and the whole house was in suspense. The seedlings. In October she planted the seeds in a long seedling bed by the garage. They came up the next spring as little grassy fans. Most bloomed for the first time in their second or third year. Then came the hard part: she looked at every one of them and decided. Hundreds of seedlings a year, and she might keep two or three to watch for a few more years, to see if they grew well and bloomed well and didn't get sick. The rest went on the compost pile. She said that was the price of the good ones and she didn't lose sleep over it. The name. When one had proved itself, she named it and registered it with the American Iris Society, and it went into the society's book with her name beside it. Fourteen times in thirty-eight years. You can see all fourteen on the catalog page. May and July In central Illinois the tall bearded irises bloom in the second half of May, and peak right around Memorial Day. Mother's yard was something to see then. Cars slowed down. People from church came by after Mass. Strangers knocked on the door and asked if they could look, and she'd bring out a lawn chair and a glass of lemonade and walk them through every bed. She kept a notebook for every bloom season, what bloomed when, how tall, how many buds, which seedlings were promising. There are thirty-eight of them, and I have them all. July was the other big month. Irises grow in clumps, and every three or four years a clump gets crowded and blooms less, so after the bloom is over, in the heat of July and early August, you dig the clump up and divide it. Mother would lift a clump with a garden fork, cut the rhizomes apart with a kitchen knife so that each piece had a fan of leaves and some roots, throw out the old woody center, cut the leaves back to a short fan, and let them sit in the shade a day to dry. Then she replanted them shallow, with the top of the rhizome right at the surface where the sun could bake it, a foot or more apart. Planted too deep, they rot. Planted right, they bloom the next May or the one after. She checked every rhizome for iris borers while she was at it. The borer is the worst enemy an iris has in Illinois. It's a caterpillar that hatches in the spring, tunnels down inside the leaves into the rhizome, and eats it out, and soft rot gets in behind it. Mother's defense was to clean up and burn every scrap of old iris foliage in the fall, where the moths lay their eggs. She was death on old leaves. Moving a Garden Mother died in April of 1996, before the bloom. That May I drove down from Bloomington every weekend and sat on Dad's bench and watched the whole garden bloom without her. I think it was the hardest and best month of my life. The house had to be sold. In July, my husband Cliff, my sister Lillian and I spent three weekends digging. Mother had a metal tag on every clump, thank goodness, and kept a map of every bed in the back of her notebooks, so we knew what everything was. We dug every one of her fourteen, and as many of her favorites as we could, about a hundred and forty rhizomes in all. Her friend Georgia Levy from the iris society came by to help us sort out a few clumps whose tags had faded, and Sadie Ruvalcaba next door, who had watered for Mother in her last spring, kept us in iced tea. We wrapped every rhizome in newspaper, labeled it twice, and packed them in grocery sacks in the back of Cliff's pickup, and drove them sixty-some miles up the interstate to Bloomington, with the windows down, smelling like dirt. Cliff had dug me three new beds in the backyard the week before. We planted everything over the next two evenings, and then I didn't sleep well until spring. We lost six to rot that first year. But in May of 1997, twelve of her fourteen bloomed, and by this May all fourteen did. When the last one, 'Last Fitting,' opened this spring, I called Lillian and we both cried on the phone like a couple of fools. Divisions for Postage Mother never sold an iris in her life. She gave away divisions to anybody who asked and a good many people who didn't. I've decided to do the same. Every July, when I divide, I'll have extra rhizomes of Mother's fourteen and some of her favorites. If you'd like one, e-mail me in June or July with your name and address and which iris you'd like (I'll do my best), and then send a few stamps or a couple of dollars for postage. That's all. I mail them in late July and early August, wrapped in newspaper in a padded envelope, with planting directions in Mother's words. This summer was the first year I tried it, and I got far more requests than I expected. Sixty-three people in twenty-one states got divisions, including a lady in Oregon whose mother had a dress made by my mother in 1961 and recognized the name. If you asked too late this year, I'm sorry. You're first on the list for next July. One request: when yours blooms next May or the May after, write and tell me. Mother would want to know. If you grow flowers yourself, you might enjoy Constance Bell's page, The Dahlia Diary, about growing show dahlias: planting the tubers, staking and disbudding, and the fall dig. Her dahlias bloom from August until frost, so with her dahlias and Mother's irises you could have a show in May and another from August to frost.
    visitors since March 1999 Nancy Wildes, Bloomington, Illinois · [email protected] Last updated Friday, September 17, 1999 |