Do You Really Enjoy Your Irises?
R. Bailey
With the iris gardener, when bloom season comes around, either one of two things usually happens. One, he redoubles the zeal with which he has been working, worrying, keening over his irises for most of the preceding twelve months. Two, he rushes about to see if his irises are blooming as well as those in his friends' gardens. Not once in a hundred cases does he make any serious show of soaking up the grace and beauty of peak iris bloom in his own garden. With him, to see an iris is to worry about it or fuss over it. When conducting visitors on a tour of the garden he makes hypocritical apologies and mutterings about the mirage-like "next year" that he is confident in his heart will never come.
These slightly exaggerated statements could be documented by any gardener touched with the saving grace of laziness or to put in more kindly -- the ability to relax.
Perhaps relaxation is the magic word. Offhand, you'd say that for most amateur gardeners their hobby is itself their relaxation. But relaxation is relative, not absolute. The possibility of applying measurable amounts of it, to the leaving of any lump are infinite. Even so satisfactory a lump as the hobby of gardening is no exception.
In short what things can you do for and with irises in twelve months that you can't do in eleven?
Irises, to be sure, are jealous mistresses. They have a way of demanding and getting first attention from gardeners who are at all susceptible to their blandishments in the first place. Their beauty is of a noble sort, automatically commanding admiration, and of a substance that cannot be argued. And I think sometimes we become enmeshed in a very unnecessary competition for their favors. It is also true that devotion can become a habit, subject eventually to the dulling effects of overindulgence. The ultimate result may not be revulsion against irises, but an acceptance of them at a level considerably below that of their true merit.
That, I think, is the real risk of over absorption in the tasks and techniques of growing irises. If irises as plants were bigger, as trees are "big" for example, or if their blooms which are their chief adornment were less arresting as to kind, quantity, and seasonal emergence, perhaps they would command the occasional quiet contemplations which would keep our judgement of them unclouded. All to few growers, I am afraid, have ever really looked at their irises at all except in terms of time or money spent, of space filled or unfilled, of new names to be added to a list, of imperfections or be scourged at no matter what the pains. Only the long view yields constructive criticism. Only the interested but dispassionate judgment can weigh overall merits. Only the relaxed mind can absorb beauty.
Is it, after all, so necessary to enjoy irises for what they are rather than as the gardening challenge they so often seem to represent? Naturally, since I raised the whole question, I think it is. These are among my reasons. Gardening for most of us constitutes a freer kind of living than the more restrictive sort we are required to pursue, however rewarding. One of the freedoms involved is the freedom to know beauty in a way not otherwise available. We are duller gardeners, and probably duller people, if we decline to expose ourselves to this beauty as fully as possible. Again, mere doing without at least a periodic appreciation of the deed being done, is a vitiating and essentially unrewarding pursuit. For one thing it is just that -- pursuit. And the world can probably do with less of it. Consider, too, that there is no better way of discovering how well worth doing a job may be than the completed job.
So at this season I urge the joys of a comfortable chair by the gardenside, the uncompetitive satisfaction of good company, the proud acceptance of your Irises as the personal reward for your season's husbandry.
(Reprinted from SSIS Iris News, April 1973)