Almost Famous...

Well, my 15 minutes of fame has come and gone. Ppffffftttt...there it was and there it went. Unfortunately I don't think it even lasted 15 minutes, sigh...

Yesterday while I was busily dividing a Lysimachia infested clump of daylilies (more on that in the future), my neighbor called me. She told me that the local paper,The Long Islander, had been delivered and there was a "very nice" article about me in the paper.

Hooray! I dropped those daylily pieces right on the spot, got in the car (mud and all) and drove to the nearest Deli to buy two copies of the paper.

At first, while reading the article I had a big smile on my face. To be honest though, that smile went through a few changes and ticks. The reporter absolutely tried her best. I can't imagine how hard it is to write about a topic that you know nothing about. In fact, right at the beginning of our interview, the reporter told me that she "could kill a plastic plant". The warning bells should have gone on at that point.

Most of the article is correct and well written. Unfortunately, we seemed to have gotten our wires crossed on a few issues. I find it hard to believe that I recommended Black Iris for the shady Long Island gardens. Black Iris? I've never grown a Black Iris. I don't think that I ever even said the words "Black Iris" before I read this article.

My memory was talking about Hydrangeas for shaded gardens. To be fair, it must have been brutal to interview me. Those gardening words we are so familiar with such as Rhododendrons, Azaleas, Native Plants, Hydrangeas, Hosta, Daylilies, and so on just trip off our tongue but to a non gardener, they must sound like a foreign language. As a typical New Yorker, I speak fast and furious, so often I sound like somebody opened the top of my head and everything started spilling out.

All this would have been fine, the bulk of the material in the article was quite accurate and I could have simply posted a correction here since the article ended with this blog address.

Oops, just one problem, it was the wrong address. I'm going to take the blame for that one myself since it's a mistake I always make. My e-mail address ends with .net and the blog address ends with .com. I'm forever switching the two and apparently, I did that again.

Just in case you are reading here and want to know about the Iris I do grow and recommend, the first photo is of Iris cristata which is a small Iris that does grow well in the shade. The second photo is of Iris Siberica (Siberian Iris) which is one of the easiest Iris to grow and will also take some shade. Sadly, neither of them are black.

So now the poor gardener-wanna-bes of Huntington New York are wandering around, lost in cyberspace, in search of that shade loving Black Iris. And me? Well my 15 minutes of fame didn't feel quite as good as I anticipated.

Melanie