May flowers and showers

Another week of gray skies and rain showers in Seattle. Today will be a fine day to spend in the museum basement, working on archive projects.

Still...so much beauty is packed into the garden during the short weeks of May. The tall, bearded iris are starting to flop over from the rain, so I've been cutting stems for the house. The colors are spectacular and the ruffly flowers almost fake looking. They have a strong and distinctive herbal scent (I wouldn't say "fragrance") that you'll catch walking by the vase, mostly at night. It's easy to see why some gardeners go nuts over iris, and start digging up their lawns to plant more.

The plant is named for the Greek goddess Iris, who was the divine personification of the rainbow. She used the rainbow to glide to the ends of the earth carrying messages to gods and men. What an image!

Here's a pretty iris poem from an old 1931 "Green Gate Gardens" seed catalog:

The garden with its little gate of green,
Invites you to enter, and view mysteries unseen,
Its vine laden bowers and overhanging trees,
The air filled with sweetness, the hum of the bees,
The flagged walks with iris galore,
Of most beautiful coloring, unknown before,
Pink, white, purple, yellow, azure blue,
Mixed and mingled of every hue,
You come away wondering, can more beauty be seen
Than in the garden with its little gate of green.