Welcome Back!

In the spring of 2006, construction began on my mother's addition to our house.  My father had died the year before, and their house and yard were too much for my mom to take care of by herself.  She didn't live very far from us, but my husband, Chad, spent quite a bit of time over there helping take care of things. 

One February day, we were all out for lunch at a restaurant, and the food was taking a very long time to reach our table.  While we waited, mom was talking about selling her house and trying to find something smaller, with a smaller yard.  Lightning, or something, struck Chad and he said we should just add a mother-in-law's apartment to our house.  It seemed like such a simple solution to the problem!  Mom liked the idea, so right then and there, they started drawing the plans on a napkin.

As we found out what would be required by our town to do such a thing, the plans morphed a bit, but things moved very quickly, and work started just three months after the idea was sparked.  As the construction went on,  one of the things that had to be done was digging up the front yard to put in new sewer and water lines, and they had to go through part of my perennial flower bed.  When all the digging was done, one of the things I noticed was that there were iris corms scattered around; I'd had three varieties of iris in that section of the bed. They weren't necessarily anywhere near where they had been, some of them were mixed in with the dirt that was now in the middle of where the lawn should be.  I gathered up what I could find, and put them back in the flower bed we were reconstructing.

Over the next couple of years as the irises grew back and began to bloom again, they were all mixed together, but I was only seeing two of the varieties.  I was kind of sad that I was missing the third type, because it was my favorite.  But there was still some hope.  There was one very small chunk of iris root that grew a few little spikes, kind of off by itself.  Since there wasn't much root left, its recovery was taking longer.  I have watched it all of these past six years, and wondered if it would ever bloom.  I was so excited this year to see a couple of bloom stalks growing, that I could hardly stand to wait for them to open!

When that first bloom finally did unfurl... yes!!!  It was my favorite burgundy and gold variety that had been missing all of this time.  Now I will have to be patient as it continues to grow and spread so that there will be more of them.  Welcome back, my beautiful friend; I have missed you so!