Collecting Stories and Plants

During my lunch hour yesterday, I documented a farm slated for development. Its well-drained, gently rolling topography will be manipulated by earthmovers and its soil suffocated by asphalt. The trees that provided shade to the farmhouse and shelter to livestock and wild creatures alike will be tossed in a pile and burned. The small stream and drainages meandering across the farm will be drained and vanquished.

I photographed the buildings, the landscape, and tried not to remember all of the times I passed by this site with my father. But bits of those conversations insisted on filtering in, making my eyes burn, as I recalled his comments on how the land laid, and the folks who tended the farms in the area over the years. The last thing I did before I left with my camera and a heavy heart was to scrabble in the dirt, removing by hand several bearded iris rhizomes.

The rhizomes I saved from destruction.

Although I do now travel with tobacco sticks in the back of my car (for assisting wandering cattle off of the road), I don’t usually have a shovel. Fortunately, the earth was bare around the various patches of iris, so disentangling them was simple.

This wasn’t the first time I undertook a makeshift plant rescue operation.

Circa 1969 photograph by Clay Lancaster of Plancentia. From the Clay Lancaster Slide Collection at the University of Kentucky. https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt7d513tw53v_641_1

Over 20 years ago, armed with a shovel and several five-gallon buckets, I visited an early 19th century brick house in Fayette County known as Plancentia. It was spring, and in the early evening, the yard around the empty house glimmered with jonquils and daffodils. That farm soon became a subdivision, but three buckets of bulbs bloom continue to prosper on my family farm.

Scavenged iris that perfume the air and delight the eye every spring.

There used to be a little white house at the corner of Redd Road and Old Frankfort Pike, and beside a stone wall (see photo below) were clumps of the most delicious light blue iris.

Circa 1990 photograph of Old Frankfort Pike and Redd Road, Lexington, Kentucky. Photograph by Christine Amos, NRHP files.

The house, garage, and the iris are all gone – except for the ones I managed to save, and that now multiply with giddy delight on my farm.

I take photographs, I record, I document, and occasionally – I dig.