Novelist & Storyteller

I was a nineteen-year-old bride when my best friend’s mother gave me a sack of gnarly iris rhizomes as unassuming as a bag of dead sticks. I love iris, the way they spiral out of a chrysalis bud with draping, iridescent petals, mysterious inner structures reminiscent of the delicate bones of the inner ear, and furry, golden caterpillar adornments, a welcome mat for bees. How could I, a woefully naïve teenager, possibly grow such a magnificent flower? My friend’s mother assured me all I needed to do was bury them in the dirt, just below the surface and they would grow—no matter what. No fertilizer, cultivation and barely any water required.

I cut out a strip of grass and dug a shallow trench in the hard dirt in front of our ground-floor Section 8 apartment. I spread the rhizomes in the trench, covered them with dirt and low expectations. Green blade-like leaves poked through the dirt that summer. When the leaves died in the late fall, I figured the whole plant did too. Next spring the green blades broke the soil and the stalks with their tight buds rose nearly to the height of the windows.

Then, like a miracle, the flowers unfurled. I was astonished. How could something so beautiful grow from wizened brown clumps and emerge from concretesque dirt? And yet there they were. The kids in the sprawling apartment complex quickly discovered them and swooped in to break off stalks to triumphantly carry home to their mothers; much to my outrage. Then “management” discovered them. I was summoned to the office for having an “unauthorized” garden. “How can it be against the rules to grow beautiful flowers?”

I dug most of the rhizomes up to move with us and our meager possessions to a small turn-of the-century (twentieth century that is) house near the university. I left a few behind as a tiny act of defiance against rules prohibiting making things beautiful. Again, they exuberantly unfurled their lavender and gold glory in their new home.

Over the years, most of the rhizomes would move three more times with some of their sisters left behind to bring beauty to a place where I once lived. Now, some fifty-five years later the iris are again awakening to bring brief magic to my home in the high desert mountains. They’re tough, these irises; withstanding withering drought with cactus like resilience. They require no fussing or fertilizing, only appreciation for their brief mystical appearance each April.