First, "Thank you!" for contributing your iris fragrance descriptions to this forum! My hope is that this will become a reliable reference source for people who are searching for a fragrant iris from their past (Maybe something they remember from Grandma's garden?), trying to identify that wonderful NOID in their iris bed, or just looking for an iris with a particular fragrance. Please use the cultivar name as the title of your post. And please only post descriptions of that one cultivar in that post. If someone has already posted their description of your cultivar, feel free to add your own personal fragrance perceptions as a comment to their post. Everyone experiences fragrance a bit differently and your experience might vary for any number of reasons. Thank you for helping with this project! Randy

This is Katy's story, as told to me and published with her permission; Scented iris bring back memories of my childhood growing up in a home floral, nursery business, and farm in Las Animas, Colorado in the 1950's. Every "Decoration Day", now called "Memorial Day", my parents cut their iris and we five children carried from the field, armloads of iris into our onion storage warehouse. There a team of women created fresh bouquets of iris and peonies with our floral shrubs for fillers. Those iris armloads were heavy, but I loved their floral variety, colors and varied scents as a child! The local elementary school lunch cooks saved gallon and half gallon vegetable cans all year for my mother to cover with pretty and colorful floral foil for complimentary bouquet containers. My parents delivered these floral arrangements to the community cemetery early in the morning after working for the previous twenty-four hours. They had received telegram and phone and letter orders from all over the United States, as the youth who left this small town for distant jobs wanted to honor their deceased ancestors. This was the most prosperous season of their business and I assume that similar floral displays were in every local cemetery in the West. Townspeople congregated in the town cemetery to visit graves and clean the markers and headstones or to listen to the military programs of the VFW or American Legion men. I was saddened when plastic flowers, and then silk flowers became popular in cemeteries, probably in the 1980's and since then.

This is Melody Masi's story, as told to me and published with her permission; ‘Song of Gold’ was originally bought by my mother in the early 1950's. I don't know where she got it from, but probably a local grower, as there was one a few miles away that had many, many acres of irises. My mother, my nana, and I, would go to walk through them, smelling each, and finding delight in the different fragrances. Although she was a newly married person, just starting out, she valued flowers, irises in particular, and would buy one or two a year for our garden. ‘Song of Gold’ was a shared favorite. This one was planted under my bedroom window and as a very small child, three years or so, I remember waking to that delicious fragrance. That would be 1950. When I left to make my own home, I divided it and have replanted it with me, wherever I've gone. Years before my mom passed, I asked her how I would know she was still with me. She thought long and then said, "I'll make the yellow irises bloom". She passed November 6, 2011, and I thought, "well, I'll have to wait awhile for that sign". Our iris only bloom in spring here. Within a couple of weeks, the entire back page of our local paper had a half page picture, and a story about the unusual and inexplicable blooming of some gorgeous yellow irises. It hasn't happened since.