Will the Real Loretta Aaron Please Stand Up
Gail Wettstein
Was it being lowered down into her family's cold, dark well to scoop out toads? Could it have been all those scorching summers in the cook-shack feeding the harvesters? Maybe it is just being a gardener. We all know gardeners are half-crazy, and after all, Loretta Aaron is a gardener!
If you have ever seen her plumes at the State Fair, or admired her arils at our Iris Shows, or been helped as a new flower exhibitor, in all likelihood, you are familiar with Loretta Aaron, and her work. If you have read her weekly column in the Saturday Oklahoman, you probably know Loretta well enough to imagine her explaining matter-of-
factly to the neighbors to the south how her bathrobe ended up blowing into their yard. (Obviously it had been protecting the arils one cold, windy night).
Gardeners are born, not made, and Loretta began tending iris about the time she was lowered down into her family's dank, mossy well on a wooden seat to pull out toads -- in the first grade. Her very French and flamboyant Grandmother brought "blue flags" from Kansas to Indian Territory by covered wagon. Years later the clump had survived. They were the most beautiful flower Loretta had ever seen. Loretta took on the job of watering them, and keeping them safe from here uncle's greyhounds. The dogs seemed to think Loretta had made that nice moist place just for them. Her dad built a picket fence around the plot to keep out the dogs. Loretta also had two tires filled with soil in the fenced plot, and she transplanted (successfully) wildflowers from the prairie.
The fence had no gate, so Loretta had to jump over it with her bucket full of water from the stock tank. She used half of her annual allowance, 5 cents, to buy four o'clock and zinnia seed. Just a few years ago the garden fence at the old homestead was still standing.
Her collection of iris and her passion for the flower grew in Oklahoma City. She got her start showing when her neighbor, Vince Hill, then president of OIS, noticed her iris while he was dumping his grass clippings at the vacant lot next door. He paid her annual dues to OIS ($1), and enthused, "Anyone who can grow iris like that can show." Mr. Hill promised to meet her at the next show and help with the paper work. He left the difficult part up to her -- how to get the entries to the show when she had babies to take care of.
Loretta's sister came over to watch the children, and her brother-in-law drove her to the show. Loretta sat in the back seat holding six blooms. Vince Hill met her as promised, and she took a first, second and third. Lady Mohr, who still occupies a place of honor in her garden, took best of section.
Loretta was hooked, and never looked back. Entering the iris show the next year was a bit more complicated. Loretta's sister would not take care of children in diapers, so baby Peggy had to come along. Loretta packed her in one box and the entries in another. She brought Peggy in first and put her under a show table next to the wastebasket. The table was covered with a sheet. Suddenly another entrant discovered Peggy. "Oh my God, it's a baby!" Wondering what all the fuss was all about, Loretta replied, "She's mine, and I'm taking her with me when I leave."
After showing, and winning for several years, Loretta introduced herself to C.A. Cromwell. She had admired his arils, and asked him if he ever sold rhizomes.
"Everybody can't grow them", he replied.
Loretta was not scared off, and C.A. allowed that he had a few rhizomes and would sell them for $2 each. Loretta came to his home to buy three. C.A. was not optimistic.
"Reluctantly I'm selling them to you because I know they're going to die."
They did not dare to die! The next year Jabel Kerah opened the day of the show and won best aril. One plant did not bloom, and one bloomed the day after the show. Forty-nine iris seasons have come and gone since then. Loretta has not missed an iris show.
Five years later a friend talked Loretta into entering the State Fair. Her boss would not let her come in late to work, so the friend picked up her entries on the show days. Her winnings -- $12.50. Her crested cockscomb took a blue ribbon, as it has every year since.
I first met Loretta through her exhibits at the State Fair. I found myself staring in disbelief at the plumes: row upon row of creatures beyond my wildest imagination. Row after row of blue ribbon winners -- things that could have hopped off the pages of Dr. Suess. Little did I know then that of course I had never seen anything like them -- because Loretta bred them up herself. It wasn't all blue ribbons that day. There was one that had a white ribbon. Had a bug crawled out at just the wrong time? Had it held its breath during the overnight soaking? Anything defying perfection in Loretta's garden has to be pretty darn fit.
Three years later I met Loretta in person, like so many people do, while entering an iris show. It took three years for me to get there, but not because I wasn't trying. The first year I brought a specimen that could have been named "Dish Rag." It's muddy color and limpness was set off dramatically by the candelabra of Beverly Sills entering behind us. The show chairman graciously suggested "Dish Rag" could go "over here" near the kitchen. The second year "Tahitian (something)" made it just up and over the railroad tracks. My five year old son, holding it in the back seat, did not mean to bounce up and snap it's head off. The third year Miss Illini crept with extra caution over the railroad tracks and entered a bit sheepishly. Loretta came up to me (of course I did not know it was Loretta at the time) and offered to show me how to "exhibit" the bloom. The stalk I had pushed into the vase metamorphosed, under Loretta's guiding hand, from a frog with potential to a prince(ss), and Miss Illini won a first.
Some years passed when, suddenly, another dimension of the real Loretta was revealed during one of her talks on the perennial garden. She brought a bouquet from her garden and worked her way through it to Platycodon, the balloon flower.
"Whenever I see Platycodon," Loretta explained, "I think of..." She paused long enough that every ear waited, wondering which turn down memory lane we might take. "Twisting the heads off small children." I was captivated. Bounding up at the end of the talk, I gushed, I laughed, I got invited to her garden.
By now I had seen several years of Loretta's State Fair entries. The plumed celosia, the crested, the mammoth zinnias, the things people say don't grow in Oklahoma. I had seen the iris entries in the spring -- the arils, the tall bearded. I had seen the daffodils. I had seen the purple rosettes, the silver plates. I wondered how many acres did Loretta farm?
There are people who punctuate their directions with "You can't miss it." Usually they are wrong. Loretta was right. The front yard glowed. Pink reverberated into rose, and rose into mauve. As wonderful as this was, nothing prepared me for the back yard. Loretta led the way and said something about I "should have seen it two weeks ago." If I had been there two weeks ago, maybe I wouldn't have survived the shock. I had never seen anything like it.
We were in the languid ripeness of summer when yellow and orange take over. They tumbled around the yard. They bounced into each other. They laughed, "Come play with us!" Who would have imagined that tucked somewhere behind all this were 140 tall bearded iris, 45 arils, 4 species, 6 spurias, 12 Louisiana's and 8 Siberians?
There was no hint of the vegetable garden Loretta started 40 years earlier when she moved to this home with a handful of iris rhizomes and children. As the children grew, so did the flower garden. The vegetable plot shrank as the kids left home.
Everyone knows gardeners are different. At 6:00 a.m. one show day at the State Fair Loretta told me she had her best Climax in the garden the day before. At the time of course I knew she was talking about marigolds. Then I told a friend who looked at me a little weirdly. What do you expect? She wasn't a gardener.
Loretta tested the mettle of my son when he as about 10 years old. She invited him to catch the white moths floating around the zinnias. When he caught one, she instructed, "Now, pinch off its head." The pioneer woman looked straight at the city boy. Tender hearted, he could not comply. There is no room for sentimentality when it comes to horticulture.
I've held up Loretta's garden to my daughter as a standard to aspire to. One Saturday morning in late March, probably about five years ago, before we went to Loretta's, we checked out my garden. Little poppy plants had survived and formed a stubbly, but very enthusiastic green carpet. Loretta had given me the seed. When we got to Loretta's we saw what can only be described as shrub-sized poppy plants. Seizing a teaching moment, I asked Karen, who was 10 years old, why Loretta's plants were so big while ours were so small. She looked matter-of-factly and explained, "Steroids."
Loretta never confirmed or denied this theory.
My Grandma BeBe turned out immense and wonderful meals from a space in which the one doing dishes and the one working at the stove would become very well acquainted. And I thought to myself that while our kitchens are getting bigger, our cooking is not getting better. If the same thing is happening with gardens, Loretta provides an inspiring exception.
She makes no excuses...
Loretta is for me the Julia Child of gardening: always encouraging viewers and readers to try new and exotic recipes. We can look inside her compost heap, and say with conviction, "I can do that!" And Loretta is happy to stand beside any new gardener and answer, "Of course you can!"
Oklahoma City Beautiful recently discovered something the rest of us have known for a long time. They awarded Loretta the Distinguished Service Award for Information and Education, "in recognition of her many years of encouraging the public to enjoy all phases of gardening in our city and state."
I believe an even greater tribute comes from all of us who grow and exhibit all kinds of flowers because Loretta showed us the ropes. One year as we were leaving the County Fair after making our entries Loretta said, "Well, you have your best horticulture here this year. I hope you beat me." Of course I didn't.....but maybe this year!