Iris Eyes are Smiling

By Sally Sears

Wild iris, native and blue, smiled on the far bank of the Floataway pond. We planted a few as a Morningside neighbor’s gift and watched the plants thrive in the damp meadow at Zonolite Park. Blue Flag Iris (Iris virginica) spread quickly along the edges of the water, raising bright flags of true sky blue on top of sharp blue green leaves.

So imagine my wonder, turning to dismay the next year when they came back yellow instead of blue. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My iris eyes were looking at Blue Iris and seeing yellow. What had happened? Vivid yellow, bright as goldenrod, floated on top of the sharp leaves. Nothing blue in sight.

Yeoman Pete Densmore, head of the Friends of Zonolite Park, had put volunteers to work all that year yanking out cattails. Nobody wanted a pond full of cattails because they hid the pond surface and crowded out a range of birds. The removal was terrific, but I wondered if the yanking had somehow turned the nearby iris from blue to yellow.

My smart garden friends shrugged off my question. They of course wanted to see for themselves. A few weeks later, we came back. And to my amazement, the iris were blue again. Just as I remembered from the year before. Was I looking through lying eyes?

My gardening friends were amused and slightly condescending. Now, Sally, anybody can mistake yellow for blue, of course! Just enjoy how the hummingbirds are liking the iris.I burned inside. Lying Eyes? When Iris Eyes are Not Smiling!

I turned to the internet in a frenzy burning with humiliation. The very word iris means all colors. The Greek goddess of the rainbow is named Iris. The color of our eyes is the color of our own iris. This was not helping much. This year I went early in April, staring at the plants on the near side of the pond, daring the flowers to show up, wild to figure out if I am in fact crazy. I am not crazy. The buds starting to unfurl were yellow again.

Driving through Morningside I saw the same yellow iris in dozens of yards, beside mailboxes, in tidy gardens. Not a blue flag iris anywhere. All April I watched the yellow iris spread a buttery scarf along the pond edge. I bided my time.

In May, my crazy color mystery began to be resolved. On May Day, dozens of blue iris bloomed. A month ahead of the blue flag iris, a yellow European cousin (Iris pseudacorus) is enjoying the same habitat. The yellow iris can be a bit pushy, but both are thriving, both good for pulling pollutants out of the storm water pond.

And both are smiling treats for all of our iris eyes.

Chestnuts for Life

Thomas grips Chestnut trunk

When he was nine, Thomas Rudolph and his Morningside Elementary classmates in the fourth grade pushed chestnut seeds into pots to see how fast they would grow.

The seeds were a special hybrid hoping to restore the long-gone species to Atlanta. Chestnuts grow fast, and by summer, the foot tall seedlings outgrew the classroom.  You can eat the nuts these trees will grow before you get out of high school, the Chestnut Foundation teacher promised.

They did grow fast. The seedlings were two feet tall by the fall, when Thomas and other scouts from the Haygood Methodist troop planted them on the South Fork of Peachtree Creek on a steep slope.

WABE’s Myke Johns brought a microphone, recorded the excitement and broadcast it to all Atlanta. Thomas remembers that lots of people thought it was pretty cool.

Eighteen or so of the young trees made it through that first winter. But the excitement of the experiment began to fade as Thomas turned ten. Then eleven. The promise of tasting real chestnuts growing on the trees began to grow less important.

Middle school. High School and sports. Science class and lacrosse, ten years passed.

Then, this winter, a senior in high school, Thomas decided to check on the trees. He and his mom Monica walked from the Armand Park trailhead to the steep bank he remembered from ten years earlier.

They climbed, pulling aside wintery vines, looking hard at bare branches.

Then, overhead, a few thin leaves waved a hello. Thomas wondered if they were looking for him. There, in plain sight, he found the biggest of the five surviving chestnut trees.

Excited, Thomas leaned in.

As if waiting for him, spiny chestnut hulls lay in the leaf litter.  By his feet he saw the first harvest of chestnuts from the trees his class began as seeds.

He didn’t find any nuts left, though.  Chipmunks, possums, all kinds of chestnut-loving wildlife found them first. Still, he filled his fists with the prickly hulls and put his hand around the trunk of the tree. The trunk was thicker than he could grip. His smile was radiant.

That Chestnut Foundation scientist had been right. In ten years under the right conditions, chestnut trees can mature into nut bearing food sources. 

Thomas is off to Auburn University in the fall. The trees he and his classmates brought to life will be here when he comes back home to visit. If he times it right and gets there this fall before the chipmunks and squirrels, he can taste the chestnuts himself.

Thomas examines chestnut burrs

The Confluence Trail in Winter

By Dorothy Sussman

For most of my life, I have lived near water.  Growing up, it was the Hudson River in Northern New York, but for nearly five decades, I’ve lived not far from the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.  For many of those years, though, I hardly knew it existed. When I did notice it, I did so from a state highway bridge because the Creek was nearly impossible to access.

I remember my amazement when I first walked on the Confluence Trail as it broadened to a meadow near the point where the South and the North Forks joined. So this was the Creek! Who knew? We worked with a Boy Scout troop to whack and pull up choking invasives. Another time, people joined to plant chestnuts and another to pick up trash in a swale and another to mow the trail or help with native tree plantings.  Hard, gratifying work and lots of it. 

Today, I walk the trail with relative ease. I get on at Armand Park in my neighborhood and fairly soon reach a rain garden right on the trail.  It’s a glorious and thoughtfully constructed assembly of honey-colored boulders and native plants that slows storm-water runoff coming from a nearby culvert, preventing erosion and pollution of the creek. Right now, the plants are dormant (they need a rest, too), and the boulders even more prominent. Together, they hold the soil as if to say, “We’re staying put.”

Farther on, dun-colored river oats hug the banks as I walk through a cathedral of trees. Here the trail offers a fuller view of the creek itself as it meanders along before approaching the I-85 overpass. A snapping turtle suns itself on a log that juts into the water. Birds keep watch from water oaks and pines. Ahead, native trees and plants, such as yellowwood and sumac, installed a few years ago with the help of Trees Atlanta volunteers, dot the landscape. When they leaf out in spring, these natives and many others will help mute nearby highway traffic. 

And then, across the meadow, rises the magnificent 175-foot-long Confluence Bridge that now spans the junction of the North and South Forks. It glows copper in the sun, beckoning people like you and me to pause for a bird’s eye-view of the creek and then to walk the trail. When it opens, the bridge will also sport a ramp replete with viewing platforms, that we can take to enter the Confluence Trail going south or to head north and connect to other parts of the trail system. I can’t wait!

During this pandemic year, the Confluence Trail has been a gift to many people, offering us a way to be in the natural world—in all seasons. I hope you will make time in your lives to walk the trail whenever you can and take in its rugged yet fragile beauty. You might even decide you’d like to get involved in protecting the creek and its trails, and that would be all right with me.  Perfect, in fact.