Irises have always been my favorite flower.

When I was a kid, my folks had a vegetable garden as well as patches of daffodils and tiger lilies, but the irises were scattered around. So I asked if I could make an iris garden. Not knowing much about it, I dug an 8-foot square bed and with my folks' help, separated a bunch of irises and tubers and carefully planted them. To my surprise, they flourished.

Our house has a lot of irises, from a couple of big beds to small accent beds to a long row along a fence. The fence separates the backyard from a pasture where our big burros, Edgar and Rice, live. Burros like to browse, as well as graze, and they have decided that iris buds are great appetizers. So our long row of very healthy iris has fewer than 20 blossoms. Sigh.

How we came by these iris is a story in itself. Some came from an acre-plus field maintained by an acquaintance of my wife. Three or four years back, he was tired of tending to them and planned to plow them under, so we filled our cars with iris plants. Around the same time, a neighbor on a quiet side street where I walk decided to redo their landscaping and evidently got a small earthmover to dig out and deposit a sizable bed of just bloomed iris on the curb. I spotted them on my walk, ran home for our pickup and literally hauled the whole clump into the truck bed. It took less than an hour to transplant the whole batch in a corner. Voila - instant landscaping!

So, enjoy the fruits of our labor and the survivors of snacking burros.