Re: Re: Stanley Garden/Opal Brown intros

Bill, your comment of Opal Brown being ahead of her time is certainly apt.  Brown's Sunnyhill Gardens was located in College Place, a suburb of Walla Walla, Washington, until a new highway around Walla Walla took them out, so Opal relocated a few miles south, just across the border into Oregon.  The two states for that area are divided by a county road.  The new Milton-Freewater address for Brown's Sunnyhill Gardens was just down the road a ways from State Line Road.
 
The last time I saw Opal was on a business trip that took me through the area.  It was close to lunch time, so Opal said, "Let's go get a steak and some fries," so we went up to State Line Road and pigged out on the biggest steaks I've ever seen, and talked iris the whole time.
 
I visited Sunnyhill a number of times in bloom season.  It was about a four to four and a half hour drive from home, up over the Blue Mountains and down to the Columbia Basin.  Walking the rows of seedling reselects and new irises to the market, some hers, some from other breeders was an education.  The first time I saw LIGHT FANTASTIC I could not believe it was real.  It had the strangest buds--they were so ruffled they didn't stay inside the bud sheaths.  From the time they were a half-inch long they were out in the open.  The substance was so heavy it looked like the flower was cast in blown glass.
 
For the AIS auction I'm sending some old catalogs.  One of them is Opal's 1977 in which I took a lot of notes.  If I were a buyer at the auction I'd find such notes an asset and rather fun to read.  Others may not, as I was not writing for publication.  I had my judge's ballot in mind, and I made some frank and uncomplimentary critical remarks about some things I saw.  Some others were noted simply "Wow!" 
 
Brown's Sunnyhill was the closest large commercial garden to our area at that time (no commercial enterprises other than Mel Suiter's and my own were located in the general vacinity of Boise).  Often several of us would car-pool and make the trip together--Wilma Valette, Mel Suiter and I, and sometimes one or two others from the area made the trip together more than a few times.
 
On one occasion, I had run into Keith Keppel in Wenatchee at their regional meeting, spent a while in Jack Boushay's "J & J Iris Garden" then over the river to Gordon Plough's for about a day and a half.  Then we all headed for Milton-Freewater and spent a day and a half there too.  Keith and I hadn't had a chance to gab face to face for a long time, and I believe that was the last year (1977) we had a chance to meet in person.  More often than not we were in agreement about what we saw and liked, or didn't.
 
Among Opal's seedlings there were some wild beard colors and wild Progenitor-derived bicolors.  But boy howdy that sun there sure could get hot.  Opal had a straw hat with about a three-foot wide brim.  I wasn't so well prepared, nor were some of the iris bred in the shade.  If they couldn't take the intense sun, they didn't look too good there.  Her own looked wonderful.
 
Neil Mogensen   z 7   mountains of western NC

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