My neighbors – Joe and Rose – used to have peonies, iris and bleeding hearts, but a new fence hides the old flowers. As a tribute to these two gentle people, (They have moved to an assisted living complex.) I’ve planted many of the old flowers on my side of the fence. I put the iris in a huge plastic pot and am hoping they will fill it with their creeping rhizomes. My flower-bed that shared the wrought iron fence with the neighbor’s, was removed in the big dig. (I lost the snow-drops in the removal and didn’t realize it until I was in Cambridge at the monastery and spied a cluster jutting from the frozen earth. In the seeing, I realized the loss.) The new side-yard design eliminated the flower-bed and I’m using large pots, on the cement ground, to bring greens and yellows into this sterile surface. The iris on the left is from one of these large, plastic pots. There were buds on the plants that I selected at the nursery, hence instant flag. (It’s only in Pittsburgh that I’ve ever heard people call iris flags. Yahoo! Answers says that the German Iris are often referred to as flags. Well, western Pennsylvania is full of families from old Germany.) I don’t if the rhizomes will bloom next year, but if they don’t I’ll still have the rigid green leaves. In the image, the blurred background, at the top, is the new wooden fence.

I’m continuing to work with the 800e. For the image in this post, I shot with an 18-300 millimeter lens and used Photoshop to adjust for brightness and contrast – the yellow ruffles, the deep orange beard are beautiful.