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Other than daffodils and tulips, no flower signals spring more strongly than the iris. With their upright “standards” (petals), softly flowing “falls” and sharply pointed foliage, they parade through the season in every color but red. Tiny iris reticulata, whose blossoms resemble their taller Dutch cousins, sets the stage in early spring, peeking around rocks and springing up along walkways. By mid-spring the classic, bearded iris with its large, upright standards, whisker-striped “falls” and lance-like foliage steal the sunny spotlight. With hardly time for intermission, a whole new cast composed of Japanese, Siberian, spuria and Louisiana irises takes center stage. In all there are close to 300 species of irises. Bloom times extend from late winter to early summer, and the conditions under which they perform at their best vary as much as their bloom times. Some thrive in swamps or shade, while others require bright sun and good drainage.

In St. Louis, one of the best places to view irises at their showy best is in the St. Charles garden of Don and Sue Jo Delmez. Where irises are concerned, Don is a virtuoso. He not only grows them, he creates them. Japanese irises (Iris ensata) are his specialty. In his relatively small yard, as well as on the half-acre iris “farm” he tends three miles from his home, Don crosses named varieties of Japanese iris to create new and better cultivars. “Anything you introduce to the market, you want to be an improvement over the parents,” says Don, who has created 23 different Japanese irises registered with the American Iris Society. He has been called the “Midwest’s leading hybridizer of Japanese irises” by iris society experts.

“To be registered, anything you introduce has to be in commerce, available to the public,” he explains. “If you don’t sell it yourself, it has to be sold by someone else.” Three years are normally required for a flower to result from Don’s experimentation. He has been hybridizing for 15 years and can tell immediately if the blossom is worthy of registration. “If it’s really exciting, it will catch the eye immediately,” he explains. “There’s not a lot of guesswork.”

A retired tool and die maker, Don comes by his horticultural talents naturally. His grandfather operated Delmez Gardens, a Pittsburg, Kansas, truck farm, growing both vegetables and flowers. His parents, Leon and Mary Delmez, were also avid gardeners, hybridizing both daylilies and peonies and growing tall, bearded irises. “My Dad has a garden named after him at Kansas State University at Manhattan.”

The Delmezes, who have two grown children and three grandchildren, have been gardening at their St. Charles home for 35 years. “I like getting my hands in the soil,” says Sue Jo. “It’s therapy. I’m now to the point that the garden doesn’t have to be in bloom for me to enjoy it. I can get turned on by clumps of things coming up in the spring.”

When the couple first moved in, they inherited nothing but a number of trees and a forsythia hedge that ran along the west side of the property. The house was built just a few years prior to their move, and the heavy clay soil laced with tree roots was inhospitable to gardeners. “In this subdivision it had been hard to grow grass,” Don laughs.

They began their efforts by removing some of the trees and creating garden beds by lining them with heavy, black plastic and topping the plastic with enriched soil ranging from 15 to 30 inches in depth. Because the yard slopes away from the house, the majority of the beds are self-draining. Where they are not, Don has provided drainage.

Landscaping began with a perennial border, backed by the forsythia on the west side of the house. In that colorful bed, irises mix with a variety of perennials including foxglove, daylilies, campanula, peonies, coneflowers and heuchera (coral bells). The east side of the residence, accented with dappled morning sun, became an Oriental shade garden resplendent with the cool greens of hostas, hellebores, small Japanese maples, dwarf holly, azaleas and more exotic species such as a weeping, disk-leafed katsura tree – known for its rich green summer color and apricot to yellow fall foliage. 

A bed of Japanese irises, with a special section reserved for Don’s introductions, lines the back of the property. Parallel to the iris bed and up a slight, grassy rise, a strip of vibrant red, pink and white Sweet William softens the length of privacy fence that surrounds the couple’s patio. The fence creates a sheltered microclimate directly off the back of the house. This protected area allows the Delmezes to truly test their green thumbs by growing tender shrubs and perennials, including camellias, which normally would not survive the St. Louis winter. In addition, Don has attached a small greenhouse to the rear of his home to protect other marginally hardy plants that he digs up and brings in from the cold.

Nurturing new iris cultivars and tender species is what keeps Don fascinated by gardening. “You keep looking forward to something new,” he says, “something growing in the garden that you have raised from seed.”