Iris Season!

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One of Van Gogh's many iris paintings.

Finally, the tall bearded irises in my backdoor bed are blooming. They opened sometime last night and this morning when we came out the door, there they were, glistening in the morning sunshine. That long wait was totally worth it. Several of these iris rhizomes were rescued from the lawn which had crept into their overly shady bed. I dug them in the middle of a misting spring rain, in the very chill world of mud and drizzle that is the early year. And the incident inspired this Poetry Friday post.

My purple veined iris that came with our house.

I think the irises I was digging and transplanting that day are these lush, purple veined ones, and I think the fluttery lilac one below is a variety I ordered from the excellent folks at Shreiner's Iris Gardens, along with a brilliant butter yellow which I hope is still coming.

If you're looking for some new irises, I heartily recommend them. The only caveat is that you'll get lost drooling over the photos on their web site. If you're a novice gardener, looking for some recommendations, bearded irises are a good pick, they're beautiful, often fragrant, make beautiful cut flowers and given sunshine they are carefree and unfussy. I love them for all these reasons and also for the fact that they are so historically enduring. Irises are one of those flowers that often outlives houses or at least the owners of said houses and will still be bravely blooming every spring, even if their good gardeners have gone on to contribute to the soil themselves. I love a resourceful romantic, even if the romantic is a plant.

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Monet's iris path. Someday, I'll visit.

Next iris task is to paint my own rendition of them, after the great masters of brush and palette. I have in mind to try my hand at this beautiful basket of cut irises for sale that I photographed in a garden France during our trip to Europe in 2008.

I've been thinking about it for years, way before I "could" paint. A and I used to play this game somewhat perpetually called "If I Could Paint" wherein we'd call out to the other person and point when a particularly heart-tugging image hit us and we wished we were able to wield a brush. It still cracks me up to think that suddenly one day, I discovered I could paint...I have years of catch-up ahead of me. That game set me up with a long list of future subjects.

Related articles

• A Dummies Guide to Growing Irises (shantara.wordpress.com)
• Coffee Table Book of Irises (flowergardengirl.wordpress.com)
• Have I Told You I Like Irises? (allchainedup.wordpress.com)

Poetry Friday: A Spring Tanka

Image by NedraI via Flickr

Happy Poetry Friday! 

I am writing in loose, Americanized tanka today, a new form for me. Tanka is a form, similar to haiku and also brought to us from Asia. Many modern poets use similar standards as with haiku, setting up the template to flow: 5,7,5,7,7 (each number denoting a syllable) similar to the sound portions that break up the Japanese language.

Most of the great historically memorable tanka poets were women. They wrote about a range of topics, often nature (Ah, the Japanese!) but it was also common to write a poems for your lover at the end of the evening together to remember a sweet or poignant moment. Is that cool or what. High romance if you ask me. Kind of fun to play in a new format. I have always loved haiku and thought it would be good to mess around with a new variation. It was a short poem kind of day.

April Morning

The morning is so
Noisy now in April
A wild tumult streams through the
Cracked window, too loud to read
Din of lilac buds breaking.


Nothing like hope, eh?
I am writing this, looking out at the lawn, towards our lilac bush which is promisingly full of buds but not close to blooming anytime too terribly soon. I do hope we get a few mornings like this. My money is all on April....those buds are swelling more and more and one of these mornings there's going to be a real rumpus!

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Hop on over to today's Poetry Friday host and check out the other contrbutions!