‘A Good Doer’

Do you have certain plants that you would describe as being a ‘good doer’? In other words, any that surprise you by performing above and beyond what you had any right to expect. It turns out that I inherited one here at the Money Pit’s garden.

It’s a white iris that was at the front of the north side border in the backyard, probably just one or two fans when I moved in during late 2014. I remember noticing it in passing the next spring (“Oh, there’s a white iris here”) but there were so many issues to take care of at that time, I confess I didn’t give it another thought.

Here’s an October 2018 photo of its location, with the iris fans circled.

I do recall noticing that it had rebloomed in September one year, which made me wonder if it might be ‘Immortality’, the best-known reblooming white TB iris and one that I’d had that in my previous gardens. Seeing the mystery iris do the same, I made a note in my garden database of its reblooming tendency.

By May of 2020, this anonymous white iris had reached a size that called attention to itself, so I began including it in my regular round of garden photos. Some of the fans rebloomed in September again.

And in May of this year (2021) it was putting on quite a show! (No, I have never divided it; shame on me.) By now, I was fairly sure that this must be ‘Immortality’ even though I had planted some of those in one of the front beds in 2019 and noted that those rebloomed about two and a half weeks before this clump did.

Here’s a close-up of the mystery rebloomer….
…and of ‘Immortality’ in the front walkway bed. These also begin their spring season bloom about 10 days before the mystery clump does.

My MWRPI (Mystery White Rebloomer Probably Immortality) rebloomed on schedule in late September/early October this year. However, this time it did something unexpected a little while afterwards.

One of the fans put up another reblooming scape in early November! Here it’s being examined by my little granddaughter during a November 7^th holiday-card ‘photo shoot.’  Assuming that the next light freeze would zap them anyway, I cut the bloom stalk for her to take home.

But this Energizer Bunny of an iris fan wasn’t finished yet, because I took this photo 18 days later – on November 25^th! I’m not sure whether this secondary scape counts as a second rebloom, or a third rebloom (because the bud developed almost three weeks after the previous two), but either way, this plant certainly is a far-beyond-the-call-of-duty ‘good doer’!