What was your first flower?

Kathleen Sayce

There’s a theory that people who like plants and garden throughout their lives express that fascination at a very young age. It usually happens between ages 3 and 5, when we are avidly exploring the world. I know a birder who made that initial and lasting connection with another life form at age 2 (mallard duck), and wildlife biologists, ditto, ages 4 and 6 (rabbits and deer). 

A Pacifica Iris seedling in my garden, 2021

What was your first flower? Did that sense of connection change as you grew up?

I have a friend whose first fascinating organism was a pansy, at age 3. He saw a flowering pot at his grandparent’s house; his grandmother was a lifelong gardener. He picked it up, studied the plant, and was drawn in by the flower’s colors, complexity and petal shapes. He became a horticulturist, worked in well-known gardens and nurseries across the country, and now grows plants from all over the world, has a seedling garden where he grows dahlia crosses, and does amazing flower arrangements. Flowers became his life at age 3. 

For me, the fatally attractive flower was an iris, age 2. There was the snaky rhizome, creeping across the surface of the ground. It was so un-plant-like! The flower was stunning: standards and falls and shaggy beards in a fascinating asymmetry. The light shining through the purple petals was amazing. And the shape of the flower buds was simply entrancing. 

I now know this was a purple-flowered tall bearded iris, but to my young self, it opened up a view into the other half of the living world—plants. 

I wanted to weed out the grasses and study how it grew, but my mom disagreed. She said the flowers were old fashioned; she planned a vegetable garden in that spot. We had just moved to a new house, and the next year she did indeed put in a vegetable garden with pole peas and beans, radishes, carrots, zucchini, and an asparagus patch. I promptly began checking radishes every few days to see how the root developed into a round edible vegetable, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say my parents were not pleased to find the radish seedlings vanishing day by day. 

My love of that first iris flower morphed into a fascination with all things chlorophyllous, which led me into lichens, mosses, kelps, wildflowers, and eventually into Pacifica Iris. 

What’s your story?