GARDEN OF DELIGHT

Teri Carnes became a breeder of hybrid irises in about 1990. ().

MT. EMILY — Teri Carnes has walked out to check on her flowers early and found people eating their breakfast and watching the sunrise — in her garden.

She's had to explain to neighbors that she was out in her flowers at night with a flashlight — not a suspicious stranger.

And yes, Carnes is as careful about breeding her irises as any rancher is about breeding their livestock — she just does it with tweezers when the time is exactly right.

The description of that process requires a serious flower breeder and isn't for the casual gardener.

Teri and Monte Carnes have made farming their life for many years, along with raising hogs on their Lizabeth Lane farmstead at the base of Mount Emily.

Teri Carnes has been involved since childhood with ranch animals, but only became a breeder of hybrid irises in about 1990. In 2000, her years of work with plants and animals, and with helping her husband deal with a debilitating illness, helped earn her the title of Agricultural Woman of the Year at the annual Farmer-Merchant Banquet.

Carnes hurries the conversation on to less embarrassing things than the honors and praises she's earned.

On a sunny June day, she takes a few minutes to sit on the arbor bench that leads into her Quail Run Garden, named for the little birds that love the cleared aisles between her irises.

"This is my golfing," she smiles as she looks over more than half an acre of blooming, multi-colored irises bordered by Canterbury bells, fox gloves and a spattering of other bright flowers.

Quail Run Garden used to be an old barnyard, Carnes explains. When the land became the Carnes' in the 1970s, she started cleaning it up and realized that it had better soil than her flower beds nearer to her house.

Planting it to grass seemed a shame, so Carnes started thinking about what could go in the ground.

"Irises don't take much water, and I wanted something that could do with little care," she said. And a plant that liked full, bright sun.

She started planting irises in the old barnyard in about 1989, she says, "just a little at a time."

Her new flower beds — Carnes' favorites are the pastel shades of frilly-edged irises in yellows, pinks and light blues — weren't enough to keep her happy for long.

"I started hybridizing in about 1990," she says. "I've slowed down a lot." And hybridizing irises means having some of the deep, rich colors available to maintain the variety of colors she's after. Patches of deep purples, vivid blues, rich gold and almost burnt orange irises draw the eye.

To prove the claim that she's slowed down, which the garden itself doesn't bear witness to, Carnes leads the way to her beds for new irises, which this year number just a dozen or so.

"The first couple of years I bloomed out a lot, maybe 1,000."

Since each growing iris plant needs a 4- by 4-foot space, Carnes' garden expanded rapidly.

Carnes had joined the National Iris Society and had started reading about creating hybrid iris of varying colors, petal shapes, and stem and leaf strength.

"Iris are so easy to breed," she explains to a somewhat skeptical non-gardener. "You breed one year, and two years later you have a blooming plant.

"It's just about instant gratification."

Carnes' irises start blooming usually in about mid-May and continue until the latter part of June, with different plants blooming early, mid-season and late. It makes for several months of color at Quail Run Garden, she chuckles, since the garden also is home to about 50,000 daffodils, daylilies and other plants.

It is the perfect place for Carnes, who admits that "I'm constantly changing things in here."

Different corners or sides of the garden have different themes, often marked by different styles of birdhouses or garden ornaments. There's a Victorian section, a traditional farm section and others scattered around blending from one spot to the next. Howard Elmer's metal birds live here, as do Jason Steinmetz's glass balloons and Carnes' own homemade wooden birdhouses.

Carnes shares her irises without a qualm, leaving a notebook near the arbor so people can make a note if they'd like a rhizome to start their own irises when she digs them in the fall. Carnes has started asked a $3 fee for the starts, a set of two rhizomes of their choice, but only to ensure that people take her carefully nurtured plants and plant them.

Carnes tells visitors to her garden that it

doesn't take much work, but that may depend on how work is defined.

She deadheads fading blooms each morning, and takes care that pollen doesn't reach the stage to start blowing around and hybridizing without her involvement. Weeding is done, "as I go," she says. There's not a stray blade of grass to be seen.

After the irises are done blooming, Carnes cuts the stalks down, and starts digging up the rhizomes in July for those who want one of the plants.

She puts them on racks to dry in a nearby, uphill, barn. The rhizomes are also soaked in a fungicide. And on a three-year cycle, different parts of the iris beds are dug up and the soil revitalized.

She harvests the "pregnant" seed pods in October and November, planting the seeds in planting beds.

The skeptic looks at Carnes with raised eyebrows about her claims of "not much work," and that "I have helpers," and that she certainly

doesn't "live, breathe and eat" irises. But volunteers do come out and help with the necessary work, including one woman who, Carnes says, wants to duplicate her garden.

While irises are, Carnes laughs, one of the Grande Ronde Valley's non-productive crops, she says that "there are some male farmers in the valley who get the most excited" when word comes that her iris are starting to bloom.

Her guess is that the interest in her irises rests on nostalgic memories of an earlier generation of mothers growing the flowers.

With all the chores of keeping a farm operating, raising livestock and caring for her husband, Carnes knows why her iris garden gets the attention it does.

"This is just for myself," she says without hesitation.

She remembers mowing the old barnyard, and remembering that putting the irises in "just seemed to fit the bill."

Friends with irises gave her her first rhizomes, "and I ended up with more iris than they had." To add variety in the early 1990s, Carnes admits she would order 10 new plants per year.

Visitors to her iris garden just come and go, she says. There's no check-in and seldom does anyone call ahead unless a large group is coming. There's room here for a walker, although the pathways aren't paved. Here and there is a bench to pause and look toward the Wallowas over the sea of irises.

Carnes doesn't register her hybrid iris creations, and has named only a few for her sisters and friends. But there is a Mount Glen iris she created, she admits.

"I breed for what pleases my eye," Carnes says. And for stamina. With Grande Ronde Valley winds, rains and occasional hail, you won't find fragile stalks in this garden.

The fame of Carnes' garden is spread by word of mouth, but the word is getting around. One year visitors from a southeastern state visited and asked for rhizomes. And Carnes has send iris rhizomes to the Willamette Valley and to Utah.

Carnes smiles once more about when asked how she plans her garden.

"I have a real laid-back garden attitude," she says. "I design with my riding lawnmower."

If anyone who once sees Quail Run Garden believes that Â…Story and photos

by T.L. Petersen

of The Observer