The rainbow goddess

I think Iris was the goddess of the rainbow?  LG and I took a tour of a local Iris grower's display gardens and my head is just crammed with color!  Between beards and falls and cups and veining and edgings, Irises have enough color options to make the poor old goddess cross-eyed!  I post some eye-candy just for the fun of it.  (I do love digital cameras which allow you to take a gazillion photos and throw away the .99 gazillion that would have been a gross waste of film.)

The display gardens were planted with more than irises, and whoever laid them out had an eye for design.  These huge pink poppies want to be calendar girls!

And the vivid pink of this peony amidst the navy blue iris just took my breath away.  I am SO glad our yard is shady, because I wanted to buy them all and would have gone stark staring crazy trying to decide which to get. (some of the new ones are $65 a corm- or bulb - or whatever they grow from.) But irises like lots and lots of sun.  They bloom in the spring with the glory of a lovely high-school cheerleader who marries and gets pregnant right after graduation.  Then the bloom fades, and the rest of the year is all spiky leaves and dark roots, and fading into the background.  And they get fussy, needing extra support and lots of maintenance, so I'm just as glad I can't have any.

And I'm delighted that other people love and pamper them.  They are such a treat for the eyes!

Then there are the names!  A bi-colored one called,"Toucan Tango!"  A little brown and yellow one called "Bumblebee."  Evidently iris growers constantly seek to develop a black iris and this garden held sable petaled beauties named  after every piece of music you can think of with black in the title."Paint it Black","Black Magic," "After Midnight, . . ."

In fact, this grower names a lot of their irises with music titles.  It might be fun to do a musical tour of the garden sometime.  Can you sing this iris? "When the Deep Purple falls, over sleepy garden walls . . ."  This is an expedition that we should make an annual event.