Sharlyn Rocha: "There are people who actually get into fights over these things."

Walt swipes at his watering eyes. "Yeah," he says, momentarily gaining control of himself. "Oh yeah. We have stuff to talk about besides iris." "Ah-boy," says George. "Ahh, boy."

Only one iris is native to San Diego, I. missouriensis. The first batch lines the boggy lakeshore in Cuyamaca State Park across the street from Wally’s Lakeland Resort, the other two crawl over private property on the far side of Lake Cuyamaca.

For some reason George’s sighing tickles Walt all over again, and there the two of them sit, aging gardeners grunting in cheap patio chairs under a charmless Clairemont sky. Around them the last flurry of Walt’s irises perks skyward, their necks craning to escape from smothering weeds he doesn’t have strength to yank.

These old boys are laughing themselves sick.

Walt McNeel and George Bange. For a while McNeel was Mr. Iris, but an auto accident in 1980 wrecked his upper body.

I knew they’d been self-conscious because my errand put them in the uncomfortable position of feeling inspected in their own back yards. A strange woman in a ridiculous hat had thrust herself into their lives, brandishing a tape recorder and demanding to know why they were involved with the tiny San Diego/Imperial Counties Iris Society. For a week and a half I’d asked any number of pert or bonehead questions, and for all they knew I was plotting to caricature them in print, or worse, to ferret out petty quarrels among the club’s longtime members and hold those up as depravity that hip readers might condemn — the self-centeredness of middle-class retirees, perhaps. Proof the instant intimacies of Shangri-La mask materialist despair.

Steve Rocha at iris show in Balboa Park. His aunt and uncle own Nicholson’s Woodland Iris Gardens in Modesto.

Oh, my. I might have been up to that.

Yet even not knowing my motives, these men were hosts first and interview subjects second, intelligent hosts with more knowledge to share than I could absorb. They’d detailed the genetic histories of bearded irises with intriguing names, such as ‘Almost Gladys’ and ‘Chocolate Shake.’ They’d given me their recollections of local plant breeders and other, semifamous hybridizers they’d met over the past four decades.

Don Maurizio spends $400 to $500 a year on new introductions for his mother.

They’d explained which iris species do well here and which don’t and told me about local soils, how in some areas of this county the stuff you’re killing your back to dig into is decomposed granite while in others it merely looks like granite. Along the coast and on uplifted mesas such as Clairemont, it’s highly cemented, slightly metamorphosed sandstone conglomerates speckled with modeling clay. In some pockets the modeling clay’s predominant. Most of this natural bounty’s infertile and rendered even more so when irrigated using mineral-salt-laden tap water from the Colorado River. And, as a bonus, the surface of some of these soils repels water.

(If I weren’t afraid of exclamation points, I would station one at the end of that last sentence.)

They showed me unfamiliar iris cousins including the Walking Iris, Neomarica gracilis, and its “nonwalking” friend Neomarica caerulea, and also Watsonia, which burgeons upward like a gifted and talented gladiola. Glads are iris cousins too, of course. George kept me from tripping over the grassy Homerias and gently suggested I temper my enthusiasm for the South African import Dietes, or Fortnight Lily, featured in such exotic garden locales as the Food 4 Less parking lot.

In short, Walt and George did a bang-up job of validating their local reputations as iris authorities. But then, in one moment, they lost it.

One minute they were sharing small stories about visiting big commercial iris nurseries, and the next they were near hysterics.

Months later I replay my tape of this interview over and over, trying to pinpoint which chuckle pushed them over the edge. They are self-composed, apparently fond of one another but just a bit awkward with me. Then they are silly.

I rev the tape backward and listen to it again. There I am, asking about one of the founders of their local society, a frail thing with good clothes and bad posture I’d met the day before at the iris show in Balboa Park. I ask if Thelma Carrington was, in her club-founding prime, what social critics back in Arkansas call a “tea lady.”

“No, she’s kind of homefolks,” George says. “Not a tea party attitude.”

“No,” Walt says, pondering. He starts to chuckle. “We had our person for that business.” I can see him arch his white eyebrows at George, who snorts in response.

“I’d better not say any more.” Walt scooches higher in his chair. “Be sued or something.” But then he guffaws. And then he just keeps going, in spite of the tape recorder I’d made a point of waving under his nose.

I remember how he plucked at his suspenders, spinning a howler about a long-forgotten iris-society soldier bee who stung herself in the butt for a room full of people mighty tired of her tyranny.

“She meant well, you know,” Walt said finally, reining himself in, making the effort people with good attitudes do remember to make, sooner or later.

There was a sober pause while he and George recollected their good attitudes.

“She meant well.”

“Ah yes,” said George.

Quiet fell among us for three seconds or so, but then Walt got the giggles.

“She was one of these that was always a stickler for Hoyle’s or whatever, Robert’s Rules of Order and all this stuff.”

George’s baritone boomed across the rosemary bushes. “Not only could you not get far enough away to avoid the hearing of it,” he said, “but she wouldn’t stop using it.”

A mockingbird dipped its tail in the loquat tree; a pile of junked rhizomes waved merrily in the compost barrel nearby; and the iris guys were off, regaling one another with gossip about worthy clubwomen of the past and their broomstick hobby horses.

This was not the kind of gossip in which one malicious person seeks an ignorant ear to scandalize, but rather the decent kind, the warm kind, the kind in which friends who’ve been through the wars admit their own complicity, their own failures on the civility front. I heard about the day Walt found himself unable to stop shouting, the day George said things he immediately wished he hadn’t said.

Through years of service in floral societies — George in the iris, daylily, and epiphyllum clubs, Walt in the iris society alone — they had learned that, by and large, gardeners are friendly people, upbeat, relaxed, and fun to be around.

And yet.

And yet sooner or later you run into one that might have been placed upon this earth for the sole purpose of allowing the rest of us to exercise the virtue of patience. These club vets had learned how terrible it feels to tangle with status-hungry control freaks and how funny one’s fury becomes, years after the fact, when recollected in the presence of a fellow sufferer. They had learned that even a simple committee project like stapling a show brochure can drag you through the cruelest knotholes ever threaded by forbearance.

Many people would quit a club because of one obnoxious member or because antagonism between two obnoxious members interrupted some fantasy of elegance. But then they’d never reach the heartfelt chuckles shared by not only these two men but other stalwarts of the San Diego/Imperial Counties Iris Society. In two weeks I heard a lot of outrageously funny gossip, most of which I swore not to repeat. But death releases some of the material. For instance, one now feels safe admitting that while the San Diego Floral Association lost an army when it lost Penny Bunker, the iris society lost its only member relentlessly committed to dusting and displaying silver show trophies the way they had always been dusted and displayed, so help her God. Or that the late Dot Runde was not precisely a timid person.

I learned that members of the iris society cherish a sometimes giddy intimacy built upon more than acquisitive interest in a flowering monocot. They may have joined because they decided to like irises (in Walt’s case he may have joined because his mother decided to like irises), but years later they remain irisarians because of something more, something not exactly to do with horticulture and not exactly to do with keeping busy, something touchy-feely sounding that is nonetheless a redemptive force in the lives of those wise enough to accept it. I will not embarrass my hosts by naming that something. Suffice it to say that when you stick with the same group of people for a long time, you begin to participate in hilarious understandings.

As ten-year club member Pat Brendel of Fallbrook put it, “We’ve occasionally thought of quitting, especially when we’re so busy and our health has not been good. It isn’t always easy keeping up. But I would have to give up those people down there, and I do not want to give up on those people.”

The iris club almost gave up on itself two years back. Decrepit, exhausted, and dying off, it almost released its affiliation with the American Iris Society and disbanded. By some accounts, that would have been a sensible choice. Times change; volunteers drop away, and most iris varieties are not the easiest plants to market here. Young people, people with families, do not want to spend Sunday afternoons at the senior center talking about why earwigs gobble iris pollen when they could be down at the beach with their children, happily dodging sea creature poop. And ’90s gardeners aren’t willing to spend vast sums on separate memberships to the rose society, the daylily society, the geranium society, and the iris society when they could spend one small sum and join a general-purpose garden club or the San Diego Horticultural Society, which meets weekdays after work. Floral societies that convene at the convenience of creaky old ladies too afraid of the freeway to drive at night are, by several accounts, obsolete.

So this obsolete iris group thought long and hard about suicide. Good gossip in Walter McNeel’s back yard, where he cracks wise with George Bange over once painful adventures in their iris world, does not explain how their club has survived so far; but every time I think of them laughing I feel a little happier that it has.

‘California Dreamer’

With his scruffy white beard and frayed suspenders, 64-year-old Walter McNeel might be an Ozark mountain craftsman; but he’s a La Mesa boy who adored his iris-loving mother, Freda, and carries on her hobby by fits and starts. He began attending meetings at age 27 and presided over the society several times. For a while he was Mr. Iris, dashing off to conventions and American Iris Society (AIS) regional treks, but an auto accident in 1980 wrecked his upper body. He does a little hybridizing now, because it requires no heavy lifting.

His mother hybridized — that is, crossbred — an iris or two, including one she registered under the name ‘Apricot Jubilee.’ Here is how the American Iris Society’s 370-page “Iris Check List of Registered Cultivar Names 1970–1979” describes her creation:

“apricot jubilee (F. McNeel, R. 1975) Sdlg. B-40. TB, 32" (81 cm), M. Ruffled and fringed apricot, flushed peach, orange beard. (New Frontier x Celestial Glory) X Orange Parade.”

Can’t you just smell it? The ais puts out 16 reference books full of such stuff, coded descriptions of every named iris on record. By my count (which leans heavily on a report by the unfortunately named Howard Hughes, who is typing the 16 volumes into a computer database), in January 1999 the ais had registered 44,874 cultivars, not including obsolete names.

Freda’s is not a complicated listing. Many require strange coding to describe varying coloration on the flowers’ three bloom parts, the upward-tending standards, the downward sloping falls, and the short style arms that arch out from the blossom’s ungagging throat, bearing the female stigmatic lip protectively above the male anther. Often these colors are translated into mysterious number codes or such arcane terms as “baby ribbon pink” and “saturn red.” They require much deciphering.

The names matter more than the beauty of the blooms. Non-irisarians don’t know this and society members protest if you suggest it, but the fact remains. Ask the most prestigious iris clubwoman in California, Claire Barr of Rancho Bernardo. Claire is a past president of the American Iris Society and its only woman president since the national association’s founding in 1920.

“It’s not that I’ve lost my appreciation of simple beauty,” she says, “but everything I do with them requires the names.” To enter a flower show, donate to the local sale, or talk usefully about a cultivar’s habits with other growers nationwide requires that one know its name. And maneuver to continue knowing it during the 11 months of the year in which irises pretty much all look alike.

The more one learns, the more one worries about names. Dorothy C. Frisbie makes a typical case. Short, wispy-haired, and deceptively grandmotherly, this former president of the Lake Hodges Native Plant Society was an accomplished gardener before she’d ever heard of the ais. Her xeriscaped confection in Escondido billows with blue-gray Californian glories and agreeable imports. One day, someone told her tall bearded irises don’t require irrigation.

“When I first got interested in iris I would take anything,” she said. “It didn’t matter, I didn’t care whether it had a name or not. I just planted it. Then I started realizing, well, maybe I’d like to know them a little more intimately, be able to address them by their names, even if I didn’t know their background.”

How much of their background a gardener knows is the yardstick of expertise in the iris world. Dorothy brought four of her nameless flowers to the 1998 iris show in Balboa Park’s grubby Casa del Prado in hopes some expert would be able to tell her their names. She also brought her Siamese cat, Chaiya, in his Pet Taxi. Chaiya was desperately sick with fatty liver disease and had to be hand-fed every few hours. He survived the outing, but her quest for name fulfillment failed.

Claire Barr was one of the experts who tried to help Dorothy, and all the while, she said, she worried about the expression on her face. She’d seen looks of exasperated compassion on other experts’ faces often enough at times when she was the petitioner clutching nameless plants. “People will come in with their dearly beloved irises that they don’t know the names of and want you to identify them and you can see that it really hurts when you can’t. But, ye gods, 9 times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100, you can’t.”

It bears repeating: There are 44,874 named cultivars.

Names drive the iris nursery trade just as they drive daylily and lily sales. Dangle an iris named ‘Warm Puppy’ in front of a dog lover and that baby will sell on impulse. But names also matter for reasons that have less to do with the bottom line than with respect for genetic potential.

Anner Whitehead, a member of my Internet iris community, explains these reasons rather well. Anner is commercial-source chairperson for the ais subsection devoted to preserving antique irises. She insists that each named iris is a botanical individual, an entity comprising genetic heritage, unique habits, and a personal history that includes the life stories of the person who created it, the people who marketed it, and the growers who have loved it. As such, named irises are not fungible. Lose knowledge of the name and you lose the self.

So there were 44,874 named iris hybrids on record in 1999, and each and every one of them was different from every other one. Not all of these irises were tall bearded plants. There are about 200 species in the genus Iris. Of those 44,874 named cultivars, I count 27,744 tall beardeds, 437 miniature tall beardeds, 1146 border beardeds, 2628 standard dwarf beardeds, 1370 miniature dwarf beardeds, 1668 Japanese, 1361 Louisianas, 1078 Siberians, 1315 arilbreds and arils, 543 Pacific Coast Natives, I don’t know how many spurias, and miscellaneous species selections. This is an imperfect count and is most likely off here and there. But the point remains.

Some types don’t like it here. The familiar tall beardeds, which do so well in Riverside, typically sulk for several years after planting along the coast. Japanese, arils, and Pacific Coast Natives must be counseled and bribed; medians, that is the dwarf and miniature varieties, whine that they’d rather live in North County; and Siberians are simply not equipped for Paradise. Grow all of these if you like the idea of running a prison camp. Some will bear a few flowers deep in their fans; some will increase to the size of a No. 2 washtub without deigning to bloom at all; some will so incline to the leaf spot Didymellina macrospora their presence in the garden will provide perpetual reproach, while others will rot at the drop of a hat, pooling a fulsome yellow ooze of Erwinia carotovora bacteria inside their withering rhizome skins and attracting, oh yes, maggots.

Enunciating these Latin names for failure before your geranium-growing neighbors will be some consolation, but not much.

Louisianas, arilbreds, and spurias, though, thrive here. They are good plants for many San Diegan places.

My count does not include the Dutch irises, used on restaurant tables, or the petite yellow I. danfordiae, which flowers early every spring, or the purple I. reticulata, hardly bigger than a hummingbird. The ais does not keep track of bulbous irises. That duty rests with a bulbgrowers’ association in the Netherlands. But Dutch bulb companies are unreliable suppliers of all other iris varieties, notwithstanding the fact that their tempting cardboard displays in the garden-center section of hardware chains offer bearded irises under legitimate names and glowing photographs. Those names and pictures can’t be trusted. Too often, Dutch growers propagate by seed, and seeds do not produce clones of the pictured plant — which is what you want.

Freda registered her ‘Apricot Jubilee’ in 1975, meaning she paid a nominal fee (it’s $7.50 now) and sent a detailed description of her plant and its parents to the national registrar that year. None of the tens of thousands already registered had used that name, so ‘Apricot Jubilee’ was accepted.

If she’d found a commercial garden to sell clones of ‘Apricot Jubilee’ to the public, there would also be an “introduction” date at the end of her official listing; but there is no such date and so we know ‘Apricot Jubilee’ was never put on the market, not even by Bob Brooks’s Cordon Bleu Farms in San Marcos. Before Bob sold his nursery to Steve Brigham and it became Buena Creek Gardens, Cordon Bleu introduced local irises, most notably including Eleanor McCown’s majestic spurias. A resident of Holtville (Imperial County), Eleanor has hybridized more than 30 award-winners since the early 1960s, and as recently as 1994 Bob helped her put three new spurias on the market.

She is not the only important breeder San Diegans claim. Doris Foster of Vista introduced award-winning aril and arilbred irises in the 1960s and ’70s.

And Archie Owen of Carlsbad created in the mid-1980s a silver-rimmed, medium-blue Louisiana named ‘Exquisite Lady’ that remains a fixture of the nursery trade. This water-loving beauty might never have entered commerce had it not been for the persistence of Valera Chenoweth, a prolific breeder of Louisianas who lived in Lemon Grove in the ’80s. Archie finally gave the plant to Valera, saying in effect, “You like it so much, you register it.” After the great hybridizer Joe Mertzweiller visited Valera’s nursery, on a busy corner in downtown Lemon Grove, and urged her to introduce ‘Exquisite Lady,’ Valera did. She registered it as Archie’s plant, of course, but in Louisiana circles it is referred to as Valera’s.

Valera belonged to San Diego’s society until she moved back to Texas to care for her sister. She died a few years ago from the effects of an auto accident that happened while she was driving home from a national convention of the ais.

Although several members mentioned pollen-daubing and although Richard C. Richards of La Mesa is known to work with reblooming irises, only one current member, Walt Brendel, dared to bring newly hybridized seedlings to the 1998 iris show. There five ais-certified judges openly discouraged him from trying to introduce any of his plants. Another grower might have been crushed, but Walt had no intention of introducing those babies. He’d brought them down from his steeply terraced garden in Fallbrook so the Seedling Division would not stand bare, denying the club a chance to explain hybridizing to passersby. He took a little fall for his society, because that’s the kind of guy he is.

By the way, the appropriate response to any hybridizer who tells you he has no intention of introducing a seedling is “Good for you.”

Of course, hybridizers do get lucky. Sometimes a cross of two likely looking parents produces a new one that is pretty, thrifty, vigorous, well-formed, bears seven buds per bloom stalk, doesn’t look exactly like thousands of plants already on the market, and — miracle of miracles — reblooms. From these blessed events, so we tell ourselves, come the 800 or so new names the ais registers annually.

“Who’s to say you’re not going to be lucky?” asks Walt McNeel.

To produce the pod that contained the seed that became ‘Apricot Jubilee,’ his mother Freda wiped an anther from an iris named ‘Orange Parade’ across the stigmatic lip of a flower from a seedling created by crossing irises named ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Celestial Glory.’ And the rest is, as is almost every gardening experiment, mere history. You cannot obtain Freda’s iris anywhere. It is gone, just as she is gone. If she had introduced it, and if it had become so popular a seller as the livid purple-and-white ‘Batik’ or the frilly pink ‘Beverly Sills’ or the near-black ‘Superstition,’ Freda McNeel would live large in iris memory. Her plant could have been as world-famous as ‘Edith Wolford’ or as locally beloved as Ben Hager’s outstanding yellow spuria ‘Archie Owen.’

That didn’t happen for Freda McNeel, but she had fun trying.

‘Going South’

Founded in 1963, the San Diego iris community’s woefully small. Like iris societies almost everywhere, including the parent American Iris Society, it lost members during this decade. Blame much of that loss on attrition, but the ais also suffered when its board raised annual dues from $12.50 to $18.00 in 1996.

Even with a past national president among its members, San Diego’s affiliate almost collapsed. And it was not alone. Clubs across the nation have been bottoming out.

As ais membership secretary Marilyn Harlow understands the iris crisis, a great many members joined in the 1950s and ’60s, years that saw the formation of dozens of locals including San Diego’s. “Those members by necessity are getting up in years,” she says. People who were ais enthusiasts for 30 years lose their gardens when they move to the Ritzy Gerbil Cage for active seniors, and a fixed income makes even plant nuts tight with money.

The national society enrolls an average 1200 new members every year and yet membership hovers around 7800. This should tell you something.

George Bange, who joined the San Diego affiliate immediately upon his retirement to Clairemont in 1989, came in as the society began to topple toward decrepitude. He was aged 59 then — new blood. He joined immediately because he’d already been iris-active in Nebraska, so active that while on vacation here from his civil engineering job there he’d attended a meeting at Quail Gardens, where the club gathered until rising usage fees chased it to the Joslyn Senior Center in Rancho Bernardo.

“So when I moved out here I joined the club right away and swore I wasn’t going to get overly involved,” he says, pausing for a well-considered snort. “So I put out their monthly newsletter for six years and served two years as president. But they were kind to me, they never made me vice president or anything like that. I turned it over to Steve Rocha in January [1998].

“We’ve had a lot of them that have been dying off from old age, in all honesty. Since I’ve been here, gosh, we must have lost seven or eight that I can think of that were busy, active members. Just this last year we lost Dot Runde and Penny Bunker and Louise Newman. Before that it was Jack Fitzgerald, and he was a major grower. It’s been attrition time.”

The 1998 show would be a small one.

“We’ve lost basically the biggest exhibitors we had, Jack Fitzgerald and Bill Gunther and Bob Brooks and Eleanor McCown,” he said, noting that Eleanor is too infirm to drive in.

Bob Brooks, an active master garden judge for the AIS, sometimes participates in shows, but irises are not his top priority. He’s more into daylilies. Buena Creek Gardens continues his tradition of donating tubs of Louisiana and tall bearded irises so the club’s floral arrangers will have material for their entries, but every year the nursery keeps fewer irises in stock.

“Good turnout” at monthly meetings fell to 12 members. No one wanted to be president.

It’s not unusual to have trouble recruiting officers, of course. I went to a meeting of the vibrant Fallbrook Garden Club at which the slate for the next fiscal year was adopted without a president. Throughout the meeting, which was attended by more than 80 people, the moderator made a joke of pleading with visitors to take the job.

Fortunately for the iris society, Steve Rocha of Ramona, a truck driver in his mid-30s, stepped into the void. Steve’s enthusiasm has given the group reason to live. As Mary McBride, the no-nonsense iris saleswoman and nursery manager employed by Buena Creek, puts it: “He’s a one-man band. He’s really doing a great job. I think the iris society has a real good chance of recovery in this area. He’s just real gung ho and real energetic and trying real hard to make a difference, and I really think he will. He’s also a doll.”

Resurgence at first was intangible, an attitude. By August 1998, it was quantifiable. The society’s monthly newsletter reported 38 members attended the annual potluck and auction at Walt and Pat Brendel’s house in July. Steve announced that the San Diego Wild Animal Park had set aside a sunny location for tall bearded irises, a display garden to which club members would donate 100 cultivars. Well maintained, this planting will generate interest among area gardeners, and it will provide opportunities for publicity as the plants approach peak bloom every spring.

I’d first met Steve and Sharlyn Rocha in our Internet iris discussion group and noticed their enthusiasm even in the emotionally flat medium of e-mail. Meeting them in the flesh set me wondering about the role physical beauty might play in leadership. Lean, lovely colored, and with attractive faces, the two of them delight their mostly wrinkled and wrecked clubmates merely by walking around a room. When Steve, with his olive skin, white teeth, and bristly mustache does his aw-shucks shuffle, you can see how people might respond to him despite his newcomer status.

He’s new to the club but not to the flowers. Steve grew up irising. His aunt and uncle own Nicholson’s Woodland Iris Gardens in Modesto (“We are out standing in your field!”). He seems to think his aunt’s influence explains why a truck driver obsesses over blossom form rather than motorcycle racing or chili cookoffs. But then there is his devotion to duty. Where did that come from?

I watched him at the 1998 show while he tried to cajole older daughter Beth out of a fit of the boreds by pointing to the trophy on which her name soon would be engraved. Beth had won the Penny Bunker trophy for exhibiting ‘Spring Parasol,’ judged the best iris in the Youth Division. The Youth Division consists of Beth and little sister Kate, who is so youthful she still wants everyone to know she can write her own name on the entry card. Kate has to be reminded not to eat grapes off her mother’s flower arrangement and not to wander into the courtyard of the Casa del Prado, where strangers are lining up to snatch her because she is darling, darling, darling.

Beth, equally pretty but appreciably more responsive to authority, has arch opinions about bratty kindergarten babies who trample the irises Mommy planted at her elementary school. But Beth is not so arch yet as to be immune to her daddy’s elation at winning trophies of his own.

Steve told me (and everyone else, including, as soon as he got home, the 300 members of the Internet group) how tickled he was that one of his entries, ‘Blue Gloss,’ had won Best Specimen. This award is better known here and everywhere as “Queen of Show,” in contradiction to the express wishes of the ais board.

Winning Queen does not equal winning the show. The exhibitor who collects the most blue ribbons wins the show. Steve did that too. And he won the Lawson trophy for best white iris and the Runde trophy for best pink iris.

The club hands out traveling trophies, sizable silver pitchers, plates, and bowls. Some bear rows of engraved names dating from the 1960s.

“See?” Steve said, pointing. “See there? San Diego/Imperial Queen of Show. Oh, this one’s fairly new, from ’92. See? Ruth Bryce.”

Pressing her small self against the table, Beth read, “Dot Runde.”

“Yeah. Dot Runde. She just passed away this year. Bob Brooks and Dorothy Driscoll, then Ruth Bryce won it and then I won it with ‘Clouds Adrift’ and then I won it last year with ‘Pro News,’ an arilbred. And then this year it will have ‘Blue Gloss’ on there.”

Steve loves trophies. He joined the society for trophies. About four years ago he wandered into Casa del Prado, looked around, and saw: trophies.

“I was looking at everything and I said, ‘Oh, I could win here. I could have won.’ (I’d been growing them.) I thought, Oh, I could have won. But then I always thought, talk is cheap. You can say anything. So I joined the society. And then the next year I went out in the garden and cut. I was real frustrated. I didn’t think I would have anything. And so I brought my stalks down, and I won Queen of Show. My first show.”

The Rochas contributed 41 of the show’s 126 horticultural exhibits, and Sharlyn submitted two floral arrangements. The couple got up at 3:00 a.m. to cut their entries and haul them to Balboa Park in Styrofoam ice chests. Then it was all they could manage to get all those sticks prepped for judging before show chairman Dorothy Driscoll closed entries.

Prepping bloom stalks for judging begins weeks before flowers open. Pat Brendel showed me how she walks up and down her terraces, looking for straight-stalked plants on which buds are held so the blooms, when they open, would touch the stems. She doesn’t want that, so she wedges the branches open using packing peanuts. A few days before the show, she places upended trash cans over plants that are trying to bloom too early. The night before the show, she encourages slow buds to open by setting stalks under bright lights on her dining room table.

Other members steam tardy bloomers in hot bathrooms or blow-dry the buds. In one notorious instance back East, an avid competitor set flower stalks in his bathroom sink, turned on the overhead heat lamp, left the tub running, and went off to dinner. When he returned, wallpaper was peeling off his walls.

The morning of the show, Steve had to pick over each flower on each of his entries for insects and then dust scattered pollen off the falls, decide whether or not to trim leaf spot, wedge the stalks upright in the display tubes, and finally buff his fingerprints off the glaucous bloom on the stems and leaves. (Pat Brendel, meanwhile, was gassing her spurias with Raid to kill ant hordes hiding in the petal folds.)

Steve could have saved himself a lot of aggravation by bringing in fewer stalks and still walked away with the top prizes. I asked why he went to so much trouble. He said, “I figured I had to. A couple of 20 years ago my aunt told me it was my duty. She told me it was my duty to bring as much or any blooming irises that I have to the show so that the public can see them.”

‘Total Obsession’

Winning trophies is one thing, leading people is quite another. Ask Steve about leadership and he shuffles his feet and turns sideways. “Yeah,” he says, “it’s different. I’m still learning to be president. Yeah, because it’s a whole lot of people stuff.”

“People stuff” is not always 100 percent unalloyed joy. But mostly, Steve says, it’s the time commitment.

“Gardening is just a way of life. You can’t have this many irises and not, you know, have it take up all your time. When they approached me to be president I was concerned that it wouldn’t, you know, take from my gardening, and it has. But we’re still doing all right. The management of time.”

Attrition remains a nagging worry. A few active younger people have joined, including Pat Neal, a competent military retiree who also edits a newsletter for the epiphyllum society, and MaryLou Gibson, a doctor of molecular medicine at ucsd.

Steve talks up the club to the people he works with, truck drivers and businessmen. “I always tell my friends, but they just laugh it off,” he says. “And we’re trying to advertise in our club newsletter, ‘Bring your kids, your grandkids.’ ”

Does that work?

“It hasn’t been working yet.”

So what gets people into a club? What does work?

Virginia Trabant of Rancho Bernardo saw a meeting notice in a newspaper. If she’d read a typo and accidentally attended a meeting of the Irish Society she would have stayed; she got into genealogy by attending what she expected to be a lecture on geology. She stays active because she’s seen people who stopped and then died, and before they died they got stupid.

Some members wax poetic about a mother’s floral habits; others report being stunned by colors at a show or by masses of pouffy bearded irises rowed out along the furrows of some mighty commercial enterprise such as Cal-Dixie in Riverside or Cooley’s in Oregon.

Don Maurizio, a superior court employee with a notable knack for recognizing cultivars by name, thinks most active society members join more for the people than the plants. “I’m in it for the plants,” he says. But then he confesses that he lives in an apartment and currently grows zero irises — not a one. But Don’s mother grows hundreds upstate. He spends $400 to $500 a year on new introductions for her. She, by the way, used to spank him and his brother with iris fronds. “I was imprinted with iris in more ways than one,” he says.

George Bange happened to visit the historic Sass Gardens in Nebraska and wound up tending it. Pat and Walt Brendel toured a San Marino iris display on their first date more than 50 years ago and happily ever after have made a point of planting irises around their homes. Hazel Carson is allergic to irises but refuses to give them up because…well, I got the impression that being told she shouldn’t do such-and-such makes Hazel determined to do it.

All of these people’s stories involve the bearded irises, and the 1998 show was predominantly a tall bearded show. Only 24 of the 126 entries were other varieties. I didn’t find even one local member who had joined to get more information about shy wild species like the Iris missouriensis that huddles in the Cuyamacas or about spurias, arilbreds, or water-loving Louisianas.

“There’s just something about a bearded iris,” said Oliver Bradley, shrugging. Oliver and his wife of 51 years, Dorothy, joined the club but had yet to attend a meeting when I bumped into them at Buena Creek. “I was too embarrassed to go down there and tell them what bad luck we’ve been having,” he said. After five years in Oceanside, the tall bearded irises they’d ordered from Schreiner’s Iris Gardens in Oregon had only just bloomed in spring 1998.

The Bradleys aren’t the only members not showing up. Steve ruefully admits that after he culled lapsed-dues payers from the roster George gave him, only 60 names remained. Compare to this the more than 400 names on the rolls of the youthful San Diego Horticultural Society or the San Diego Epiphyllum Society. An outsider glancing through the door at the Joslyn Senior Center would assume the iris group was never much and doomed to be nothing rather soon.

Whatever fate the future brings, the first part of that assumption would be mistaken.

‘Glorious Review’

Thelma Carrington appeared unexpectedly in the Casa del Prado on the second day of the 1998 iris show. Thelma doesn’t get around much. She told me she hadn’t been to an iris meeting in three years, and I didn’t have to ask why not. While she clutched her cane and caught her breath in a metal folding chair, her helpful friend Deanna DeCroce stood tactfully off to the side.

“My girl Friday,” Thelma said of Deanna. “I call on her if I need something. I’m in the hospital, she comes to see me. Bless her heart, she’s more like a sister than a friend, as well as a friend.”

Deanna smiled crookedly, not a person who feels comfortable having her thoughtfulness pointed out to a crowd. And a small crowd was collecting.

Thelma squinted through thick lenses to the lines of yellow-papered folding tables cleverly angled so a modest number of entries would look like dozens more. Vases were made of pvc tubing set in heavy wood bases, each tube holding a single two- to three-foot stalk. Round and rectangular tables along back walls bore the 32 entries in the artistic division, most supplied by flower arrangers who are not iris-society members.

I doubt she saw the scruffy linoleum, the tired walls. Her gold eyeglass chains shook as she nodded approvingly.

She’d brought three donations for the club library, including a pristine Sidney B. Mitchell title. Around her neck hung the silver medal she’d won on November 20, 1966, in the days when the club held fall shows, too, for its members with reblooming irises.

She’d always been an iris nut, Thelma said. Once upon a time she’d had a big garden overlooking a canyon; but then her husband Reavis died in 1994, and she had to give up her house. “I’m alone now,” she said. Tears welled briefly in her eyes. She changed the subject.

A few of her irises moved with her; she grows them in pots.

“ ‘Archie Owen,’ ” she said, referring to a superb yellow spuria grown by several members. “I have that one. I have others, but they’re just small plants and they haven’t bloomed yet but ‘Archie Owen,’ through all that rain. I thought surely I would lose my spurias because the water stood in there and it didn’t drain well, but ‘Archie’ survived and I’ve been watching those blooms and talking to them. I went over to them and said, ‘Please bloom for me.’ ” (Imagine a crackly, elderly voice cartooning upward cutely.)

When I asked why irises, why not lobelia, she, too, had a story about an iris-loving mother.

“My dad would tease her,” Thelma said, “and he’d come in and say, well, how’s the ‘Queen of May’ today? That was one of our irises, one of the old…irises was called ‘Queen of May.’ They’re outdated now. Nobody grows them now except maybe a few people still, the collectors.”

‘Queen of May’ was 100 years old in the 1950s when Thelma joined the San Fernando Valley Iris Society. She and Reavis soon moved to North Carolina, where she trained to become an American Iris Society garden judge.

Garden judges need reliable visual memory, analytic detachment, and a clear sense of what they are about: the evaluation of plant performance in the garden and of bloom stalk presentation at the show. It also helps if they make a comfortable living, because they are expected to travel. They train for years, pass an apprenticeship, and then give over their lives to visiting gardens, attending conventions, and judging a few of the more than 180 ais-sanctioned shows conducted nationwide every year.

So in 1962, when Reavis and Thelma the garden judge returned to California, they were appalled that San Diego did not have any iris society. Not even any. Los Angeles had a society dating from the 1930s, but not San Diego. Newcomers here imported irises from their former homes in Berkeley, Omaha, Baltimore, Richmond, and these people had social lives, but if their social lives intersected they did not do so iris-wise. Iris-wise, the uncivilized wastes of San Diego stood in dire need of missionary intervention.

“Well,” said Thelma, “the regional vice president, Mr. Thornton Able, wrote me a letter, and he said, ‘I understand you started a group,’ and he gave me a list of the ais members here and we met in Valley Center, and one lady said she had an iris garden, a Mrs. Lawson. So she became our first president. And we formed a group, the seven of us. And Eleanor McCown was one of them and she’s in her 80s now and she’s quite crippled with arthritis and she’s not able to be with us much anymore. But she’s still hybridizing iris in her 80s.”

I wanted to learn more about Eleanor’s award-winning spurias, which included several she named in the 1980s for local women such as Betty Cooper, Penny Bunker, Dena Daugherty, and…and I forgot who else. I looked around for Hazel Carson, who had chanted a list for me the night before. Hazel would know. But Thelma remembered we were supposed to be talking about club origins.

She recalls seven founding members. “Seven of us. And I stupidly said I would be show chairman, and I didn’t know anything about it at all. The first two years I learned a lot. We had no money. I had to mind the ribbons and everything, and we even gave away iris with each new membership, $10 worth of iris to get new members in those days.”

One side of her face had begun to sag with the effort of speech. Peering about the echoing room, she added, “So anyway, I had started the group here, I think, let’s see, I don’t think there’s anyone here today except myself who was in that original group.”

Months after our conversation I found a copy of The Bulletin of the American Iris Society for January 1965 and read its version of the founding. It said that of 12 members of record in the county, 6 attended the first meeting in July 1963. But 6, 7, it hardly matters now. Within a year the club had grown to 98 members.

And then somehow they convinced the County of San Diego to let them plant 120 bearded irises along the walkway to the main entrance of the San Diego Civic Center. Sixty of these were a purplish cultivar named ‘Steeplechase’ and the other 60 were a part-white, part-yellow one named ‘Flame Kiss.’ Then-County Supervisor David Bird liked the idea of sticking tall bearded irises all over the center grounds, 1000 irises here, there, and everywhere — which suggests that then-Supervisor Bird had never seen 1000 irises at midsummer in all their ratty disrepair.

Bird held a ceremony to show off the walkway in September 1964, and the television news people came, hauling their giant cameras. Then-Society President James E. Watkins handed a couple of well-scrubbed rhizomes to then-Supervisor Bird, and everyone looked squinty on TV.

After that the club put on not one but two juried iris exhibits every year and began engraving names on silver trophies. Sanford Roberts of El Cajon, a former iris-society president who now focuses on daylilies, remembers enormous shows to which Valera Chenoweth alone might contribute as many as 25 stalks of her Louisianas and — get this — 25 stalks of healthy Siberians. And other members showed beardless irises too, although not so many Siberians. Sanford thinks Valera used some kind of magic power to make them grow in Lemon Grove.

Eleanor McCown and Doris Foster brought their seedlings. Bill Gunther’s ‘Del Mar’ was a popular Pacific Coast Native; and Thelma herself introduced a dahlia-purple-and-velvety-plum tall bearded, ‘Tar River,’ which won an exhibition certificate at the show. That means the judges liked it. ‘Tar River,’ notwithstanding its certificate and that alluring name, didn’t sell. She didn’t even have a piece of it by 1998.

Thelma remembered that “we had a lot of reblooming iris at that time and even one of our members in the British Iris Society either flew over and brought iris or sent them in from Australia and we had them on the program. It was very interesting, very interesting.”

In 1975 the local society, in an ecstasy of ambition, hosted a national annual convention of the entire American Iris Society — the biggest undertaking any area ever attempts. Penny Bunker was the boss-hostess of this convention.

According to a friend who attended as a young hybridizer, hundreds of irisarians came thousands of miles to San Diego to gaze upon ten tour gardens full of gorgeous flowers, but instead they found shreds pounded by hail, dregs ruined by rain, and healthy plants that miraculously managed to avoid all untoward weather and yet refused to bloom. The 1975 San Diego National Iris Test Garden, which had been planted with newly bred cultivars so iris judges could critique their desirability as garden ornaments, disappointed the world.

Then, too, arthritic Midwesterners met Mexican cuisine for the first time in their lives and were not enthralled. Adding to their horror, Austin Morgan, a well-known creator of double-rimmers and other odd things, ordered a vegetarian lunch and was brought a ham sandwich.

Everywhere he went, my friend picked rides on buses that broke down. But the late Barbara Serdynsky, then very much alive and the ais regional vice president for Southern California, saved the day by planting sloppy wet kisses on the men. Eleanor McCown’s violet-and-yellow-streaked spuria ‘Barbara’s Kiss’ commemorates the good humor that gave disappointed, road-weary tourists a bit of saving hilarity.

Walter McNeel, who was also there, remembers the convention as a jolly time “with mariachi bands and everything.” So we have two eyewitness accounts. It must have happened.

‘Cycles’

“Two ladies had a big fight.” Beth Rocha shook her little head in amazement, scandalized as only a carefully taught child could be.

“Isn’t it awful?” her mother, Sharlyn, whispered. “I don’t care if I win anything, I just want to have fun with it. That’s the main thing, you know. But, gosh, there are people who take it so seriously they actually get into fights over these things, you know.”

I’d witnessed some of it. It had been impossible to avoid, especially the mascara-streaked aftermath.

“Human nature,” murmured Sharlyn, stroking her daughter’s hair. “Human nature.”

Flower shows are perilous times for needy competitors. In 1997, in a deeply saddened club somewhere in Flyover Country, a club still so mortified that all of the iris world has agreed never to reveal its name in this connection, a certain emotionally fragile competitor reacted with regrettable immaturity to being judged. As Mike Moller, AIS exhibition chairman, explained to the Internet iris group, “We had a problem with one person making the show more important to himself than the goals of the American Iris Society.”

Apparently this person popped a gasket when the judges did not give his irises all the blue ribbons he thought they deserved. The resulting uproar sent an elderly show chairman to the hospital with a heart problem.

San Diego’s spat hurt nothing.

“Just let it go,” show chairman Dorothy Driscoll told one antagonist, not unkindly.

Dorothy had a floral display at Art Alive to worry about; one of the iris-show clerks backed out because her horse was due to foal; another flower show in Vista nabbed most of the National Council of State Garden Clubs judges, and the student judge she’d finally located wanted to enter a design (this was allowed); the key to the storage closet couldn’t be found; Buena Creek donated no spurias. But you didn’t see Dorothy Driscoll’s face mottled with rage and exasperation.

It’s very hard to drag the cross of indispensability through all these floral productions. One chooses one’s volunteer duties, of course, but who else will do the work if these overburdened people don’t?

That is the real question.

A few days later, I’m standing in the screened porch of George and Betty Bange’s small home, joking about conflicts like the one we witnessed at the show. Hanging baskets of tiny-flowered, furred hoyas fill the back of my head with complex fragrance, and a dark tank of tropical fish gurgles on the table amid cups and trays of George’s epiphyllum and African violet seedlings.

“You have to learn the right way to give,” Betty says. Betty’s a retired social worker whose club affiliations have never embraced plants. She’s worked in professional associations, in Unitarian Universalist church circles, and she’s become very fond of her women’s writing group and its extracurricular friendships. Over the years she’s seen church groups die because older women, especially, have a hard time letting go the status they gain by holding a club title. They won’t seek new members, and meanwhile, they burn out because they’re tired of being overused.

I ask George if iris society members got sick of knowing one another too well, and he and Betty both shake their heads vehemently.

“Not so much that,” George says.

“I don’t think that’s really a factor,” Betty adds. “They don’t know how to involve others. This is how you have to do it. If you want to call it mentoring, okay, whatever. But you bring younger people along and then you turn the reins over to them and you step back. You’re there if you’re needed for consultation or something, but you let go of it. And sometimes people can’t let go of things. They just hang on, you know.

“Maybe sometimes an organization has to die before it can be reborn.”

A friend of mine in another region jokes that what his society needs is three more funerals. Looking at the San Diego/Imperial Counties Iris Society, I think that maybe this club has died enough.

‘Winds of Change’

On a sunny day at Buena Creek Gardens in San Marcos, nursery manager Mary McBride plants her feet in her gaudy mud tennies, flicks an unlit cigarette between weather-brown fingers, glances neither right toward the nursery shop nor left toward the gallon pots of Watsonia but says what she thinks and then stands staring at me as though expecting me to dare her to say it again.

“I hear it all the time,” she says, “and I’ve heard it for the last several years from members of the iris and daylily society. They complain and complain and complain about how they have no members and young people aren’t joining. And I said, ‘Well, you hold your meetings on Sunday afternoon at one o’clock. That’s a family day, especially for two-worker families. I’m not giving up my Sunday afternoon with my daughter to come here.’

“And they refuse to change the time of their meeting, because, they say, ‘Well, we don’t drive at night.’ And I said, ‘Well, we could arrange carpooling.’ ‘Oh, I can’t be dependent on someone else.’ And I said, fine, then you’re going to die a natural death. Because there’s nothing else you can do.”

She thinks meeting times explain the rise of the San Diego Horticultural Society, which gathers at 7:00 p.m. monthly on Monday nights. The nursery’s owner, Steve Brigham, is on the board of this society, and Mary’s coworker Susi Torre-Bueno edits its newsletter. Founded in September 1994, San Diego Hort has 400 members as I chat with Mary in May 1998.

Later I collect more helpful advice from a smart aleck I know only as Sy, a self-professed pillar of the San Diego Epiphyllum Society who wandered into the iris show to see his friend Pat Neal. His is a single-plant club that nevertheless attracts hundreds of members. It’s not staggering back from the brink of death. Why is that?

“Most of the people in these societies are, shall we say, mature,” he says, winking broadly. “It’s always a struggle to involve younger members, even when they want to help. But we meet at 7:30. Evening meetings are easier for people who work. And there’s friendliness. Energy.

“I’m chatty, but I have to be approached before I’m chatty. I’ve been to other clubs’ meetings where you just sit there and no one notices you. We make a point of giving out guest labels and crowding around new members. Our people will come up to meet you.

“And our show is not so competitive. Well, it’s competitive, but it’s more about fun and acceptance.”

Mary McBride again: “It’s a nice group. I mean, the iris club, the people who are in it, they are a great group of seniors. They really are. They’re all customers and they’re all friends and they’re a delightful group of people who work tirelessly to promote iris. They really do. What more can you say?”

‘Codicil’

After my sojourn among the joiners, I was ready to get away from Balboa Park, from confidences, catfights, sympathy for strangers, and painfully funny thoughts of old biddies clinging to their committee positions until rigor mortis sets in. I craved not society irises but plain irises, irises in the simplest, least artificially messed-with form available. I needed to find some species plants and gaze upon their lack of improvement.

Wild irises, including I. hartwegii and I. douglasiana, blanket hillsides in northerly counties of this state, but I’d learned from surfing the CalFlora Database that only one iris grows wild naturally in San Diego County. That is Iris missouriensis, also called the Rocky Mountain Iris or Western Blue Flag. Common as foxtail weeds across 13 western states, these simple wildflowers exist in small clusters here only in the chilly Cuyamaca Mountains. This is the southernmost extent of the plant’s range, unless you count Saltillo, Mexico (which my botanical references weren’t sure should be counted).

After ping-pong referrals from helpful members of the Forest Service and the San Diego Natural History Museum, I found Ranger Shane Coles of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. Shane assured me over the phone she knew three good-size stands of I. missouriensis around Lake Cuyamaca, and we could reach them from the road. I would need neither compass nor hiking gear.

“But they aren’t blooming,” she said. “We had two feet of snow on the park in April. I don’t know how that will affect their bloom.”

“I don’t care,” I told her, which by that time was true. “It’s the foliage I want to see.”

So, on a drizzly morning in May with hail in the park’s forecast, I set off along Highway 79. Its winding, rising two lanes swept through silver washes of nonnative, bunching grasses bordered by out-of-focus olive green and gray trees. The trees grew larger as elevation increased. Here and there the road cut into sudden rises, exposing soils that ranged in layers from tan to almost black at the top. Blue-glazed mountain laurels teetered above the car, their ruined roots clutching outward from that black stuff toward nothing.

The view opened up and I slowed to a crawl, gratefully, indulging my astonishment at noncoastal, nondesert hillsides covered by thick forests of live oaks, cedars, and pines. Rounded peaks with darkly timbered tops slumped in the distance, shouldering heavy burdens of mist. Clouds overarched these mountains, stormy clouds with dark muscles. A herd of deer fed beside the road, which was bordered on either side with an unfamiliar but Forest Service–looking fence that might have been rows of upended picnic tables.

The animals’ flanks and backs glowed tan; tree trunks behind them were silvery gray and white.

I gathered from the dimwit sign advertising “wildlife watching” that Cuyamaca is a heavily frequented park, and mentally I blessed the rain. Please, I thought. No more people. Only because I was doing a job did I tune the car radio to AM 1610 and focus on the scratchy male who wanted me to know that Cuyamaca means “the place where it rains.”

Shane was waiting at the dollhouse check-in post at Paso Picacho campground. A compact redhead with sun-crinkled green eyes, she’s got a degree in the natural history of California and has taken “a lot of taxonomy and botany classes.” When I asked her if an alarmingly large tree nearby were a live oak, she hesitated to answer, not because she didn’t know but because she didn’t know which cross-species of live oak it might be. Apparently they interbreed. But Shane calls herself an amateur.

“I have to relearn the flowers every year,” she said. “I either know the common name or I know the scientific name. I don’t ever seem to know both. When I know the scientific name I drive everybody else crazy. When I know the common name I drive myself crazy because I’m trying to remember the scientific name.”

I clambered into her SUV and perched in the passenger seat, surprised that my feet reached the floorboards. She had a beefy shotgun in there braced athwart the dash, but I can’t tell you anything more about it because my internal V-chip, which excludes all information pertaining to ordnance and bass fishing, jerked my gaze to the windshield, through which Shane pointed out soft hillsides dappled yellow and white by fading California goldfields and the famously endangered Cuyamaca meadow foam.

We found my I. missouriensis. The first batch lines the boggy lakeshore across the street from Wally’s Lakeland Resort, the other two crawl over private property on the far side of the lake. I stood in the chill and looked upon it long enough to notice last year’s seed stalks poking upright like spent daylily scapes. Hardened and split capsules topped these gray, desiccated sticks emptily, the seeds apparently carried off by melting snow or, perhaps, by ants.

If there had been flowers, they would have arched above the foliage in splays of pale lilac with slightly paler lilac falls veined lilac-purple.

I crouched to run my hand along one 12-inch fan, feeling its damp flatness and then the keen edge. Perhaps because we were early yet in the seasonal cycle, I didn’t notice any of the dark brown lesions of Puccinia iridis, the iris rust that I’d read infects I. missouriensis almost everywhere it grows. There was no rust, only busy-looking clumps with new growth shoving up from incompletely scissioned old. I. missouriensis wears the grass skirt of its dead foliage as a self-mulch.

As sheer spectacle, these flags compared poorly with the miles upon lavender miles of four- and five-foot-tall Iris giganticaerulea I’d seen three weeks before staining the horizon near Pecan Island in southern Louisiana. But as spare, indifferent, self-directed things, the irises of Cuyamaca were everything one might desire.

Shane returned me to my car and powered off to check on an abandoned vehicle, leaving me to explore the possibilities of solitude in the rain. I trudged the Stonewall Peak Trail, ignored the Cat Country warning signs, noticed the gold-glinting mica and magnetite soot among sandy puddles, marveled at fantastical shrubberies with trunks and roots so smoothly gnarled they might have been driftwood. At the peak I spent a bracing 15 minutes clutching my stupid hat while wind-driven clouds that looked to be roaring straight out of infinity rushed up and vaulted over me, hitting the stone side of the peak and rocketing skyward. When I turned to face the lake, shadows and fog shuttled across the wildflower-dusted valleys far below, visible now, now gone.

It was good and lonely up there. But after a while the dire warnings about predatory mountain lions got to me. I began worrying about that woman from North Park, the school counselor killed by the mountain lion in 1994 in this very park. A solitary hobbyist, an avid bird-watcher, she may have been like me, hungry for aloneness after days of carrying about other people’s cares.

But even as a vaguely plausible anxiety began to speed my steps downward, through the mud of the horse camp and back toward the safety of my car, toward society, I knew it was only the bluntest sort of coincidence that made that poor woman’s name be Iris, Iris M. Kenna. Coincidence means nothing.

Cheeks wind-chapped, I stumbled into Wally’s Lakeland Resort, a saturn-red Leatherette and dark wood bar and grill where beery men in backward baseball caps eyed me up and down and a TV chattered from the wall. A scrawny thing with a baby ribbon pink smirk brought me a white bowl brimming with salty, satisfying vegetable soup.

She told me that, oh yeah, she’d seen those blasted little irises blooming across the street. They were pretty enough, she said, fingering pearlescent burn scars that licked along the part of her collarbone showing through the neck of her shirt.

Her mother liked those irises, of course. Her mother had the flower crazies.

I sipped my soup, glad to be out of the wild wind, back in the world and connecting with another flower-loving mama’s child. Maybe she’d like to join the club.

“You ever been to that iris show in Balboa Park?” I began.

“No,” she said, and walked away.

We were not communing, after all. We would never share hilarious understandings, and she would not be my iris friend years from now when I am old. I would never look upon her with horticulture-induced affection.

I don’t know how people ensure their societies. Maybe the answer is darling leadership, maybe it’s the humility that recruiting one’s own replacements must require. Maybe it’s finding a time convenient to more people or bending over backward to make them feel at home. Answers are always being found and lost and found again. But one truth I do know: We have no substitute for interests held in common. Either they like the blasted irises or they don’t.

— Celia Storey

Celia Storey is a member of the board of directors of the Central Arkansas Iris Society. She is publicity director for the 1999 national convention of the Society for Louisiana Irises; she contributes to the Species Iris Group of North America, and she belongs to the Tall Bearded Iris Society and the Historic Iris Preservation Society. She’s one of four captains in charge of the Arkansas State Capitol iris display garden.