Ready for spring....

I am getting tired of the cold, patches of ice, melted water mud puddles in the day, melting snow piles and no color of green foliage in sight. We are going on daylight savings time next Saturday and you would think the weather should be a part of their making that decision. I know Washington DC is more southern and I know they will have flowers sprouting up by then but the rest of us are still having winter.
One of my unusual collections is the growing of cemetery iris. When you visit the gravesites in Iowa, the old original classic iris are still very much alive. I have had a fascination with since I was young and watched relatives place them on graves during Memorial Day. They use to put peonies and iris together in canning jars with water and put them on their graves. I remember seeing them as a kid growing on graves of an old cemetery called Moon Cemetery near Macksburg, Iowa. My Grandmother is buried there with all of her Wheeler family. My Uncle Marvin is also there also.
I have found four different ones and they are tough plants. They are a lot smaller that the normal iris seen in gardens today. Being that is appears to be orchid-like it is still a very beautiful flower. I lose hybrids all the time because of a rain filled summer and it causes them to rot. I lose hybrids because of the grass that I didn't cleaned out that also held moisture and caused rotting. But my old iris never die.
As you can see I have four species that have come from the Murray Cemetery, in Murray, Iowa. Ok, I hear all of you people saying he steals from family grave sites. That may be true, but I take a very small slip from the edge of huge growth area, where the riding mowers are smashing into them and cutting back the leaves. The plants are so tough and they are very crowded and have spread into very large areas. One site on the hill of the cemetery has the brown and yellow iris and it is being grossly cut back each spring as it is growing into the front of the stones and into their cutting paths and also is heading down the hill into other graves of different families. My small slip that I take usually takes two to three years to actually grow and bloom as I start it in a pot then move it to the garden a year later.
When my mother was alive I would take her to the cemetery to visit Dad's grave and we would walk the place so I was very tempted. She had memory problems so every month we would go and she would claim we hadn't been there for years, so we walked it over and over. This spring I plan to move clumps of my Grandmother's red peony out to the grave sites of my family. I know they won't bloom until next year but it will be nice to have them there. I also have a hybrid iris that is almost black in color that I am going to move from my Mom's garden.
As you can see the colors of old iris vary, but from research, I have read that all hybrid iris come from one common mother plant and that is the brown and yellow plant as seen above. They have cross bred that plant and all of its offspring into all of the hybrids that you are able to purchase today. They also worked on that plant and now have a larger version called Bumble Bee that one can purchase. The whitish iris is actually a very white with subtle cream falls. The one lavender with purple falls has been duplicated into a larger version also.
Well, if there are any other colors out there of the old iris, I will be looking and scouting and will be very happy if I find it. I think there is an all yellow one out there, but I may be thinking of flag iris. We will have to see. Thanks for reading.