Several years ago on a Facbook iris traders page, I met an elderly lady from rural Wyoming. We exchanged messages a few times (a lot like many of us did in the old Acmepet days) and became "friends" on Facebook. Later I was dividing some irises & sent her some of my extras. Shortly after that, she ordered some from Schreiner's and had one sent to me as well. That blew me away.... Schreiner's is out of my budget but they have most gorgeous irises!

We've kept talking thru the years.... She lost her daughter to cancer... I lost John... I got a grandchild, she got great grandchildren... Our irises continued to grow.

Last year, I was looking for a true pink iris & she said she'd have one she'd be willing to share. Shortly thereafter, I got a box FULL of iris rhyzomes. Nice big healthy ones! She marked the pink one & said to have fun with the rest - that they were mostly extras she'd grown from Schreiner's as well as a few heirloom varieties she'd collected over the years.

It was too late & too wet for me to get them planted so I stuck them in 2 big pots & stowed them in my bonus basement (under the deck) for the winter and crossed my fingers!

This spring, I was pleasantly surprised to find beautiful healthy plants growing in the pots but with all the digging taking place in the yard (and already having to relocate a bunch that I'd just planted last fall), I left them in the pots on the deck. And two of them threw up bloom spikes!

The first is the only TRUE orange iris I've ever seen. She couldn't remember the name, only that it came from Schreiner's... Looking thru their inventory of orange irises (and there aren't many), I'm pretty sure it's Orange Splash or Penny Lane.



The other is one of the heirlooms. She dug the original rhyzomes out of the foundation of a collapsed prairie schoolhouse in Wyoming that was built in the 1920. HOW COOL IS THAT????

:

I"ll be sending her a box of rhyzomes as soon as mine finish blooming and it dries out a little....