Iris queen’s legacy will live on
A beloved fixture in the Oklahoma gardening community passed away earlier this month. Loretta Aaron, who wrote hundreds of gardening columns for The Oklahoman, died July 12 at the age of 92. Though I never worked with Mrs. Aaron, I did have the pleasure of meeting her and interviewing her for an article I wrote. She was quite a person. Very proud of raising her children as a single mother… proud, also of the beautiful garden she built up in her backyard. She will be missed. Here is the article I wrote which was published May 29, 2008.
Loretta Aaron said nobody except her ever touched her garden.
How does her garden grow? A visit with Oklahoma Garden Maven Loretta Aaron
By Heather Warlick-Moore
A collection of handmade quilts and scrapbooks full of gardening columns tell the story of Loretta Aaron’s horticulture career. The Oklahoma City woman is well known among the gardening set for her green thumb. Having won thousands of first-place ribbons, plaques, trophies and other recognition for the beauty of her blooms, Aaron, who is larger-than-life in the horticultural community of Oklahoma City, stands only about as tall as some of the flowering shrubs she nurtures in her backyard garden.
Aaron was a founding member of the Oklahoma Horticultural Society, graduated from Central State University with a botany degree, wrote a column for The Oklahoman for 20 years and had a gardening award and an iris named for her.
Loretta Aaron won so many ribbons for her Iris blooms, she made several quilts like this one out of them.
Four of the quilts Aaron has created are encrusted from corner to corner with dozens of white, hundreds of red and thousands of blue ribbons from decades of Oklahoma State Fair garden competition wins. Two other quilts are dedicated to the “Best in Show” awards she amassed over the past 50 years for her blooms.
She has been offered thousands of dollars for the quilts but won’t part with them that cheaply. For her, the quilts are a legacy she intends to pass along to her children.
Now in her late 80s, Aaron looks back on her life as a patchwork of memories. She remembers springs and summers spent knee-deep in the soil of her lush flower gardens that started as a tiny patch of grass.
“I ordered 1 square yard of this African Bermuda, and I put it under the clothesline,” Aaron said. While she hung her laundry to dry in the Oklahoma evening breeze, her young daughter would play on the patch of grass that eventually grew to cover her yard.
The flowers came next. Every year, Aaron would plant new bulbs and seeds, adding to her blossoming garden. Now, Aaron’s gardens are a palette of vibrant blooms, deep earthy greens, mature blossom-covered trees that began as tiny saplings and memories of springs and summers spent under the sun tending her precious flora.
“I am the only one that’s ever touched this garden,” she said. Each year, when seed catalogs introduce new varieties, Aaron can’t resist buying one of each. And she loves a gardening challenge. “I try to grow things that people tell me can’t be grown in Oklahoma.”
Red hibiscus the size of dinner plates burst from under a tulip tree full of sunny yellow and orange ornaments in Aaron’s backyard. Black-eyed Susans peek out over white Shasta daisies and, though Aaron doesn’t play favorites with her varieties, among her most admired garden features is an Erythrina tree whose brilliant crimson blooms stop traffic driving by her house.
In her backyard, emotive yellow Columbine blooms drip from branches under a Japanese yew. A field of pristine purple, pink and lavender larkspur paints an impressionistic landscape where Flanders poppies in blood red whisper in reverence to their namesake cemetery for World War I heroes.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
(Maj. John McCrae, Canadian army, 1915)
Already wilted for the season are dozens of tulips and daffodils, of which Aaron grows more than 50 varieties. But waiting to take their places are eager orange lilies that soon will burst forth in abundance. And majestic irises with their royal hues that would become Aaron’s signature blooms perch atop stately stems, staking their claim as the garden’s crown jewels.
As Aaron’s garden blossomed over the years, the garden awards started rolling in, along with thousands in award money. Her iris entries in the state fair competitions won nearly every award possible. Aaron’s kitchen wall is decorated with just a few of her many plaques and trophies.
In juxtaposition to the sunny months spent tending her garden, Aaron remembers the many winter nights spent sprawled on her living room floor, patching together her blue ribbon quilts while her children did chores and homework. The project often kept Aaron working long past midnight.
Today, Aaron’s children are grown with children of their own. Her neighborhood is built up with homes — no longer a lone prairie. Her neighbors stop by often to visit the gardens that blanket most of her backyard and much of the front yard.
Because of macular degeneration, Aaron no longer writes the gardening column or the horticultural bulletins for which she once was famous. But she still has a little dirt under her fingernails, a sure sign of an avid gardener. She is the only person who tends her gardens, and they still thrive.
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