Thousands of blooms in a profusion of colors transform Dorothy Kolarik's backyard into a rippling rainbow of irises.
Winding down her last season as the proprietress of Dorothy's Secret Iris Garden, Kolarik and her husband, Morris, spend their summer weeks welcoming visitors, taking orders for rhizomes and tending a living stained glass window.
The neat rows of irises with walkways in between fill their oversized, 300-foot deep backyard.
"I accumulated them over the years," said Dorothy of the more than 200 varieties and colors of irises. "They're each so different in their own way, each one just a trifle different but all gorgeous."
The Kolariks' garden, which also features large lilac bushes, a grape arbor, vegetables and other flowers, is organized by nature and necessity: each iris variety sports a neatly labeled white stake.
The names range from flower descriptive — Blue Luster, Sunshine and Snow, Gold — to whimsical: Immortality, Sotte Voce, Moon Journey and Tide's In. Prissy Miss, Taco Supreme, Kentucky Derby and Vibrations weigh in with a humorous touch while Kathy's Pale Blue and Joe's Pale Yellow are named after Dorothy's children. A mutation one year that created a new color combination became Dorothy's Angel.
Shoppers roam the rows, noting on a clipboard for which blooms they want to order rhizomes — the bulbous root that the next spring will create a new plant and flowers. They pre-pay for their chosen rhizomes and then pick them up from the Kolarik's in August.
"I came here many years ago and I bought five different colors and they're continuing to blossom," said Shirley Hott of Traverse City Sunday afternoon.
This year, 20 years after launching the business, Dorothy and her husband have decided to wind it down. They have come a long way from early days when the business was unnamed but customers flocked in. While the growing Iris Farm in Leelanau County has drawn traffic away over the years, it also helped the Kolariks slow their pace as they contemplated retiring from flowers.
In a few months, fall chores will go beyond the usual trimming and tilling: they plan to remove the bulk of the iris garden, saving just two of each color.
"It's just too much work anymore," said Dorothy. "What I would like is for somebody to come out and start their own, come and dig up all the flowers and rhizomes."
The Kolarik's have lived in their modest, three-bedroom ranch home on Baldwin Street for 51 years, raising seven children and now enjoying frequent visits from grandchildren. As a young mother, Dorothy began planting flowers "right away" at the couple's new home. She began the iris garden with some rhizomes from her aunt in Detroit.
"She had 12 or 15 different ones, old ones from the 30s," recalled Dorothy. "Then I started buying irises because I like them so well — they are easy to grow in our sandy soil and they're all so beautiful and grow in so many different colors."
With a family to manage, Dorothy's passion for irises became a business only after the last child was married.
"I love being outside, in the sun, the feel of the dirt on my hands," said Dorothy. "And I love the business, it's nice to have people come and see the flowers; I like the pleasure they get."
The iris plants get a lot of TLC from Dorothy, observed Morris, though she rarely cuts any blooms for their house. Since she is outdoors all the time during the short season, she simply enjoys her flowers out there.
"We go to Mass every morning and then the first thing when we get home from church, she walks though the house — doesn't stop for anything — and goes out to see what's happened over night," said Morris, a retired rural mail carrier, adding of the early years: "When she started, we had seven kids and no money and she made something out of nothing,"