One of my Favorite Flowers!

It seems that some of the most beautiful flowers have such a limited bloom time that I am always left wanting for more. The magnolia tree, for example. Its blooms only last a day or two (if that, in the Kansas wind), and then they are gone.

So it is with iris. A week or two is all we get, and with the Kansas winds being what they are, sometimes we don't even get that many. The iris was my mom's favorite flower, and in Albuquerque she grew many different colors or it. Her favorite was the very large dark purple one, but she had others that she enjoyed. So I grew up watching the iris, trying to figure out which ones would bloom and where.

One of the joys of the iris is that it takes so little care. It will bloom almost anywhere, and as long as it has space to grow, it will keep blooming. Extreme Kansas temperatures don't seem to bother it, and it will even bloom in semi-shady areas, which is what most of our yard is now.

When Mom passed away, Katie and Bart made sure to take a few rhizomes of some of Mom's faves from her garden. Mom had given me some peach, pink, big purple, and purple/white ones, so between the three of us, we probably have a fair representation of the colors of iris in Mom's yard.

What a beautiful flower. I just wish it had a longer life.