AIS: Judges work load, etc

From first hand experience I can say that judging a show is an intense,
exhausting piece of work.  The degree of attention, care and study needed for
a show judge to be both competent and fair is not small.

The same is true for the judge who evaluates varieties in the gardens he or
she visits.  The task is quite different from judging a show, and if there is
a desire to see a large number of award-eligible varieties the judge needs not
only to spend time in his or her own garden, but visit others also, and also
attend the national AIS convention.

Generally an iris season lasts about a month for the larger beardeds with some
weeks tacked on either side of that time for the dwarf beardeds and the
various beardless types.  Any judge who (hopefully) has a garden full of
irises of his or her own also has a responsibility to keep that garden
maintained for the benefit of those who are going to be visiting there.

Just how far can a person's resources of time, energy and money be stretched?

I do hear and understand the complaints about our system but I can't think of
much that would improve it.

Out of those five hundred-plus introductions annually, how many of them are
really worthy, let alone genuinely superior?  We need to know.  We need to
know whether an iris will or will not thrive equally in Mississippi  Missoula,
Manitoba or at Linda Mann's.  We need to discover which of them are especially
tasty to borers from North Carolina to New Hampshire, or better yet, which are
not.  Do they rot and fade in Utah?  Can they take the rain in Seattle and
Salem?  Are there enough buds on a stalk to make the variety worth growing at
all?

As difficult the issues are that face our present system, it really was
intended to address those kinds of questions.  The judges I've known who do
the work within the system have been hard-working, conscientious people who
try to do the impossible, and sweat over those ballots.  I hear grumbles that
there are judges who aren't like that, and people being people, I'm sure they
exist, but I have never met any of them.

The one improvement I can think of, and it is one I can do something about
personally, is for the hybridizer him or herself to be equally as conscientous
and critical of his or her own seedlings as the hybridizer would ask a judge
to be.  Don't contribute to that five-hundred plus annual count anything that
isn't really that worthy in the first place.  Critical selection starts at
home.  The first step in improving our system is made when I stick the shovel
under one of my darlin's and toss it onto the compost pile.

The next step is not to tolerate poor quality or poor performance in the ones
I choose to use as parents, no matter how much I like the color or the form.
Bummers breed more bummers and so do those that are almost good enough.  If I
as a hybridizer am selective enough, then I help make the work of the judges
workable.  Likewise, if I put out mediocre or almost-good-enough stuff I bog
down the system and make the judges' work harder.  I would much prefer being
part of the solution than to contribute to the problem.

Neil Mogensen  z  7  western NC

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