repeaters

In writing about irises below, I mentioned my white repeaters.

As I explained, I got them on a whim, and I really didn't know that they were repeaters. The first year, they didn't put on blooms in the spring. Given the tempermental nature of irises and their cycles, I could live with that.

But in the fall, they put out flowering stalks. At I first, I didn't believe it. Bearded irises get a leaf that starts to swell, giving it a pregnant look. The stalk bursts out of this leaf. And that's what happened. As I drove around town, I saw a few others blooming, too. Hmmm. Maybe it was an unusual year, weatherwise, I thought. Or maybe mine were just catching up with the seasonal cycle. A fluke.

I also didn't know they were white. The package showed a pink iris. They have a thin purple edge to the petals. In fact, before the petals open, it looks like a pale lilac. Once opened, there is a little yellow, but it is truly a solid white flower. The year before, I had a conversation with a local woman who winters in California. She talked about her grove of white irises and how they illuminated the yard at dusk, catching any reflection of light possible. So I was actually pleased to find that mine were white.

This spring, they bloomed. And then this fall, actually quite late, they started blooming. I still have blooms. A hard freeze is coming Friday and that will end it unless I protect them. I've covered them once this fall, but like Rilke, I think it's time.

We had our one or two warm days -- yesterday was incredibly beautiful. Today, we are back to gloomy, misty weather, the stuff of autumn. At least the multi-covered leaves can cheer us, putting an array of muted and brilliant oranges and yellows in places that have been solidly green till now, amusing us with their brilliance and oddity until we get a little more acclimated to the cold of late fall and winter, with the starkness of bare tree trunks, perennial beds that empty of anything alive and green, and the periodic blanketing of snow.