Spring Flowers!!
Spring is my absolute favorite time of year! I love the increasing light of day, the weather getting warmer, the excitement of the end of a school year, looking forward to spending the summer at my favorite place (Sand Lake), and the spring FLOWERS!! I really love most flowers, but for some reason the spring flowers…the daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, forsythia, azaleas, rhododendron, and irises make me so very happy!
Recently, while preparing the flower beds I was reminiscing about my flowers and thinking about family. About 15 years ago, my mother was thinning out her irises at our summer cottage in Michigan and asked if we would like to bring back some of the irises to our house in Pennsylvania. Sure!!
My Great-Grandmother’s Irises
These particular irises have a history, they originally came from my great-grandmother Cora Orcutt Tubbs’ (1878-1958) garden. Irises are a rhizome, so they just grow and spread and replicate themselves. So, basically, the flowers that I see are the SAME flowers that my great-grandmother would have planted so many years ago.
This made me start thinking both about my great-grandmother and also about irises. What I have found about both in the past several weeks is amazing, to me! This great-grandmother is my connection to the Mayflower. I haven’t proven it, yet, but I’m working on it. It turns out that both her mother and father individually have connections to two different Mayflower passengers (Thomas Rogers & Frances Cooke). She was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and married Charles Walter Tubbs, the grandson of a settler to Washtenaw County. His grandfather, George W. Tubbs (the mystery photo I identified in my last blog) purchased 56 acres of land in 1820 in Michigan-Toledo Strip in what is now called Scio Township.
Heritage Irises
I was curious about my great-grandmother’s irises and wanted to see if I could identify the actual
type of irises. Did you know that there are Historical Societies that catalog irises? I had no idea!
But I learned.
The Historic Iris Preservation Society has an amazing website with a photo gallery of irises (3,292 of them!!) You can narrow your search
by Iris Class (e.g, Japanese, Louisiana, Siberian, etc), or Bearded Classes, Age, Standard Colors,
Patterns, etc!
I searched and searched and consulted with a few people and finally decided that the irises that have
been passed down from my mother, her mother, and then her mother-in-law (Cora) are called
Balder. They are a Tall Bearded variety. According to The American Iris Society’s Iris Encyclopediathey were originally made available by Goos & Koenemann from Rhein, Germany in 1924.
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| Balder, from Iris Encyclopedia |
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| My garden irises, c. 2019 |
My Irises are 100 years old next year!!
Beginning with my grandmother, Cora Orcutt Tubbs at her home at 921 E. Huron, Ann Arbor, Michigan, the irises began their journey in our family.
Cora is the woman in the front row in the dark dress. This is the celebration of their 50th Wedding
Anniversary at the house. It was August 1947, so if the irises were still there, they were not in bloom, but clearly she loved flowers too!
Given the time frame, we believe, although no one can exactly recall, but the irises would have had to adorn her daughter-in-law’s house (my grandmother) Elizabeth Leach Tubbs at their home at 1301 Kingwood, Ypsilanti, Michigan (1950-1972).
My grandmother took some out to the cottage, first in 1962 to the Rynearson Cottage two doors down from the current cottage. Then to (now) my parents’ cottage on Sand Lake at 3076 Marsh Road, Onsted, Michigan (1968).
I included this second photo because the four people sitting in the seats are the four grandchildren of Cora Viola Orcutt (L to R: Ed, Ted, Sally, and Anne). Ed was the tall young man in back of the 50th Anniversary party photo a head above his little sister, Sally.
And in 2010, we added the irises to our house in Riverside, Pennsylvania. I always thought they were fitting for our 1890’s home and now I love them even more!
Happy Spring! May the flowers of your garden today bring you joy and provide memories for a lifetime or.... like with the case of my irises for generations!
