Wild iris

I'm sure you're asked to "What's your favorite flower"--and for those of us who make a living pushing petals, this is a silly question. We love them all! Or as my buddy Randy Ortega says (of Nick's Nursery in Aurora) "my favorite flower is the one that just went out the door". Except in my case, the one that's looking at me now. But I confess, there are a few that haunt me just a tad more than others--and most any wild iris (which for those of us in most of the interior West means Iris missouriensis) rates right up there. How many Junes as a child did we drive past the meadows around Fraser and Kremmling in June when they were an azure dream of color and I wanted so to stop to go out and wander among them...but these were fishing trips: the likelihood my dad would stop was nil (he was so anxious to get to Oak Creek and see his brother)...

But eventually I did stop. Again and again. These pictures are from one especially memorable stop five and a half years ago exactly (June 28, 2010) on a memorable drive through South Park (not the one on T.V.) with  Wiert Nieuman --who'd just retired as director of the Garden at Utrecht, Netherlands (he'd spoken at our N.A.R.G.S. conference in Salida earlier that week). I've never seen anyone scamper into a field of flowers as quickly as he did that day!

Of course, one makes a bee-line for the albino.

This one is mostly fetching for the hint of blue in it.

 But it's really the blues (or lavender blues--or azure--whatever shade you may wish to call it) that deliver the goods...

 Really, they speak for themselves. And I shall let the rest do so.

Wiert Nieuman in a field of wild iris!