Hello all,
I am pretty new to this forum, but have been on the daylily forum for awhile now. I actually started growing irises in 1985 after I went to the local iris show in a mall. I fell in love with them then and joined the Fort Worth Iris society. I belonged to the society many many years, but then got tired of going to meetings and just dropped out. But I still grow and love my irises. I grow tall beadeds and love medians. The medians love the cold so I have to be very selective in growing them. Many have bit the dust and gone to iris heaven. We usually have mild winters here.
I retired in 2001 and then had plenty of time for my garden BUT what people didn't tell me about retirement is, you are older and don't have the energy you once had when you started gardening. So now my iris beds are covered with weeds most of the year. My grown son who lives with me helps weed some, but I find that, if I weed in early spring and the garden looks good when they bloom, then it can be "let go" most of the year and I'm ok with that. Hey, it's better than no garden at all.
When I was still in the iris society, we had the annual convention in Fort Worth TX in 1993. A local hybridizer, Tom Burseen, had a big garden and we went there on the buses. We were walking in his seedling beds and I spied this one beautiful flower and my daughter and I just loved it. I ran and got Tom and said hey look at this, he had been busy and hadn't seen it yet. I said, "Hey Tom if you ever introduce this, name it after me ok?". And we went merrily on our way. A few years later at a meeting, he walked up to me and said "If you want me to name this for you, you have to sign this piece of paper giving me permission to use your name". I almost fell over, I had forgotten about it. Anyway, my name is Dorothy Parker and here is also Dorothy Parker.
Nice to see all of you here and I love all the beautiful pictures that everyone is posting.
Dot
Dorothy Parker in 2011
and it 2010, it usually looks more like this picture.
