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Waddick and Murrain Garden 

Spring 1999 Regional Convention
By Bob Pries and Jim Morris

One, which particularly caught my attention, was a variegated Virginia creeper crawling up the front wall of the house. The green form is a common woodland plant in Missouri and is often confused with poison ivy even though the Virginia creeper has five leaflets. At the Jims’ garden, this common vine was transformed by the white splashed of the foliage. In the backyard was a small greenhouse, and planted outside were large banana trees. This became even more interesting when one learned from Jim that these were hardy bananas that had been planted outside over several years. Although Jim has several varieties that come from high on tropical mountains, the hardiest is Musa "Basjoo’.

Defying our normal prejudices of what should be intolerant of cold were hardy Crinums planted in front of the bananas. Crinum x powellii and C. moorei are two to look for. In full bloom were also three species of hardy European gladiolus. All three were a bright magenta color and ranged from about 2 to 3 feet in height. One could spend hours looking over the collections of plants from the sansevaria collection under the deck to the collection of Christmas roses in the cold frames, but I tried to focus on the iris.

Species irises are well represented. Most irisarians are aware of Jim Waddick’s collecting trips to China while Jim Murrain has emphasized a large number and wide variety of colors in Iris cristata.  To the right is Dr. Jim Waddick and Jim Murrain taken at the Destiny Dallas National Convention 2000 in Dallas, Texas.  

Jim Waddick has a number of seedlings coming on in cold frames. In one frame an Iris setosa has come into bloom. This strange iris has no standards. To put it another way the standards have each been reduced to a tiny bristle so that one sees only falls at first glance.

In one of the perennial beds another iris was attracting a good deal of attention. Just a little over a foot tall, a blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium striatum ‘Aunt May’ was blooming. The creamy white flowers in an upright inflorescence each resembled a tiny Japanese iris. What really made this a knockout plant was the creamy white variegated foliage. Near this plant the rare yellow tree peony-herbaceous peony cross was getting its share of comments.

LOUISON (Helsley ’98) was an impressive Siberian in deep raspberry with a white signal. It was a bit short but had developed a nice clump. M/S91A was a Kevin Morley Siberian that was very blue with pale blue styles and a gold signal.

In a bed close by the mottled foliage of Dactylorhiza caught my eye. Unfortunately we were still a few weeks early to see the blooms of this European hardy ground orchid.

A new stone wall graced one side of the area devoted to guest irises. One could tell that if we had been there earlier there would have been several Juno irises that would have been worth seeing.