Purple Haze

Our yard is awash in hardy, albeit very old, purple iris plants. The leaves are perennial enough, but each year, we're thrilled if we see one or two blooms. Iris are supposed to be thinned every year, and my guess is these haven't been thinned in at least 12--when our house was added to the compound. Anyhow, my grandma Majorie planted many purple (and yellow) iris around the home place when she was a young woman raising a family there, and they continued to bloom once my Dad was grown raising his own family there. Purple iris always remind me of Grandma, home, and our family. So I want to do the plants justice, and I feel fairly confident that with some thinning and fertilizing, I can get these suckers to thrive. If you care to visualize along with me, come May we'll see about a dozen white-bloomed apple trees in the yard, scattered among them, a handful and peach and apricot trees with their pink blossoms, and on the ground, round beds of purple iris.

The first step was to simply dig up most of the rhizomes so they can be relocated to new beds where black soil and bone meal await them. ("Yummy, yummy" say the starved plants.)


Here I am last Sunday just beginning the task, feeling confidence and enthusiasm.


The work seems easy enough as I start to fill my bucket.


By this time, my shoulders are hurting a lot more than I thought they would.


Now, I have to trim the excess leaves off the rhizomes and prepare them for re-planting.

After the weekend was over, this turned out to be my weekly horoscope:

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): "What is Great Purple?" asks Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki in his book *Let's Eat Stars.* Is it "a piece of purple sky floating in my lover's eyes?" he speculates. "A cloud made of purple wine passing over Mt. Fuji? The color of a full-blooming magnolia's root? The shadow of a star visible only to birds? The light of the last water you drink?" I invite you, Aquarius, to brainstorm your own answers to the question "What is Great Purple?" According to my reading of the astrological omens, you now have a special relationship not only with plain old everyday purple, but with sublime, magnificent, life-changing PURPLE. It's a perfect moment to develop a closer relationship with whatever Great Purple means to you.

Well I certainly know what the Great Purple means to me. Stay tuned. This weekend, I'll plant the rhizomes in their new homes.