(nmogens) Neil Mogensen

I first discovered a fascination with tall bearded irises as a child. I was fortunate to make the acquaintance of one of the great, but barely remembered now, pioneers of iris breeders in the mountain west, Mary Tharp. I first visited her garden in Payette, Idaho, some five miles from my own home, in my early teens. Over the next several years I was filled to the brim with iris lore, a basic education about the genus, and given many very famous historics to grow.

Eventually I joined the AIS, but my mother and my maternal grandmother, both extraordinarily gifted gardeners, had been members before me.

In the early sixties I finished the training as an Exhibition Judge, a year later graduated to Garden Judge, and finally served a year as RVP for Region Eleven, made up of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. I traveled extensively within the region that year, but realized I did not have either the time or the resources to continue and asked the region to replace me.

I began raising seedlings from the beginning, generating enormous amounts of compost and very few worth-while selections. One, a "Mohr" OB- type I named SIGRID, which circulated widely within the region and was awarded an HM, the only award I ever acquired. Tell Muhlestein introduced for me, and I had several offerings entered into the market at the time. I think there were few sales, with none of the named ones now surviving. Tell's death and my diversion into other obligations coincided and I dropped out of the society, out of the responsibilities as a judge, and sold our Idaho properties.

My wife and I went back to school--a three year program in one of the seminaries of The Episcopal Church and were ordained together as Deacon, then Priest in that church by the Diocese of West Virginia. We were the first couple in the Episcopal church to be ordained together, although there had been a number of husband-wife ministries established before ours. They all had been ordained separately, however.

For several years we worked in the heart of the Appalachin coal fields--in the Hatfield-McCoy country, our congregations including a number of descendants from either or in some cases, both, families. Upon leaving there I came to North Carolina, living east of Charlotte for four years. During that time my wife had gone to live with our daughters in middle TN. She suddenly died there in 1994, an event I nearly did not survive. I have described the event as having about a third of my "insides" torn out without an anaesthetic. After several more months in service to the NC diocese (Raleigh-Charlotte part of the state), I left that denomination and became a member of the Roman Catholic Church with the intention of seeking the priesthood there. The Charlotte Diocese's bishop assigned me to a parish near Asheville in Arden, NC, where I served for three and a half years as Pastoral Associate.

My health began to fail for reasons that were not recognized at the time, and I retired, then married one of the parishioners, a lovely, vigorous woman who had twice been widowed. Her family were wonderful people, and she and I married in October of 1998. Once again I had access to soil in which I could grow irises. With the help of Keith Keppel, an old friend, I started out with a dozen new or recent varieties, and made my first crosses in the new entry into AIS and the iris world in 1999.

Among them was a cross of Swingtown X Romantic Evening. When I told Keppel I had seeds from this cross he expressed no small excitement about its potential. His anticipation proved true, the resulting seedlings including an astonishingly beautiful Royal to Plum purple of a lighter tone than the saturated hue that is now registered as POWER WOMAN--the name has a story behind it I will eventually share. A sister seedling was going to be named also, but I discovered it blooms so heavily from the increase following the blooming of the central fan that the variety would never be able to be grown commercially. Net, saleable increase accumulated too slowly.

Both these seedlings have proved to be marvelous parents. Below is a somewhat biased photo of one of the seedlings from Power Woman crossed with Keppel's FOGBOUND.

The past three years I have had a cancer of the esophagus discovered, then removed, along with my esophagus. I was a patient, and not a gardener much of the three year period, but the grounds have been maintained to a minimal degree from help from one of my daughters from TN, and from a good friend here in western NC. I am now reconstructed with a drastic rearrangement of my internal plumbing, and I am able again to begin to care for my own garden.

Keith Keppel and Barry Blyth have been wonderfully helpful, with Blyth making a number of crosses for me in Keppel's garden. I hope to bloom some fabulous things this coming spring, but many of the seedlings have died and others have been slow to grow due to the outrageous weather we have had the past two years with double the normal rainfall--totalling around eight inches per month during the growing season, then being pounded with rain this past summer with the three hurricanes that came on-shore from the Gulf. Flooding in low areas near here was tragic, but our part of the county merely tried to wash away. I have irises with their roots exposed and have not been able to repair the damage fully even yet.

Such is life--and you have a description of some of the high--and low--points of mine. I will summarize and say one thing--I owe my survival these past three years to a massive offering of prayer on my behalf, a happening for which I am deeply grateful.