Schlatter Family Site

Iris and Daylilies   

This page describes our small flower bed containing iris and daylily plants.  First, a little background.

As described elsewhere on our website, we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in January 2005.  We bought two lots and were building two houses, one for ourselves and one for my parents.  We lost both houses and almost everything we owned in Hurricane Katrina -- follow this link to read about our Katrina experiences.

Katrina hit on 29 August 2005.  We evacuated to Louisiana where we lived with relatives for several weeks, then, in mid-October 2005, we returned to Knoxville, Tennessee, where we moved into an apartment near Joe's parents.  A few weeks after we returned to Knoxville, Joe's father died on 29 November 2005 following a stroke a few weeks earlier.  Shortly thereafter, Joe's mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  She lived for seven months and died on 18 March 2007.

We spent several weeks cleaning the house in which Joe's parents had lived for over 40 years then we sold the house, settled the estate, and moved to Northumberland County, Virginia, where we now live, within a couple of hours of our children.

When we sold Joe's parents' home, we moved several plants from their garden:

•  Two rose bushes, Our Lady of Guadalupe; these are now planted at our son's home near Fredericksburg, VA.  These were my mother's favorite roses -- we gave them to her from Jackson and Perkins.
•  A large pot filled with ajuga, a ground cover with a very pretty blue flower.  It spreads like wild -- we planted it at our son's house and will move some of it to our garden.  My mother got this ajuga from her grandmother.
•  A clump of iris -- variety unknown.
•  A clump of dwarf iris -- variety unknown.
•  Two daylily plants that we got from a daylily nursery in Knoxville and planted in Joe's mother's garden.

We put the iris and daylilies in pots and moved them around with us from the garden in Knoxville to the patio of our apartment; to a house we rented in Wicomico Church, VA, where we lived while building our house; and, now to our garden.

On Monday, 23 March 2009, we planted the iris and daylilies in a small bed in the rear of our lot.  Here are two photos.

This is the Troy-Bilt tiller tilling the iris and daylily bed.  I made several passes of the tiller over the same spot of lawn, resulting in a bed that is 18 inches wide and 10 inches deep.    I then raked the grass clumps out of the newly-tilled bed and planted the iris and daylilies.

This doesn't show up very well, but, here are the iris and daylilies in the ground.  I'll post more photos when they bloom.  From right to left are:  iris, daylily, daylily, and dwarf iris.  I planted the plants, covered the bed with pine bark mulch, and put metal plant identification tags by eah flower.

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