These are my grandmother's irises. According to family lore -- always an unstable resource -- successive generations of these flowers have been growing in the yard since the late 1930s, or early 1940s, depending on whom you ask. When I moved home again in the early 1980s, the plants had formed massive, dense clumps of rhizomes that resembled manhole covers. The roots were so congested that the plants barely flowered. I dug them up, broke them apart, stuffed 25 rizomes into each of 20 shopping bags, and hauled the bags over to Bronx Green-up at the Botanical Garden. My understanding is that Gram's irises are now in schoolyards all over the borough. She'd love that. AND -- there were still enough rhizomes left over to start over, and over, and over. These are most definitely perennial.
When I have a flattering (or at least encouraging) "after" picture, I'll post the embarrassing "befores" of my studio clean-up, clear-out, get-organized-finally project. I found out that the local Salvation Army will take books, so that is going to speed things along quite handily. When I first got the de-clutter bug, I bought a book on the subject that revealed to me that my main source of clutter is . . . books.
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