The Iris Garden

I've been walking in these suburbs for years now — long enough to see not only what is but also what used to be. On my way home Thursday, I passed a five-acre plot once home to an old farmhouse and iris garden. The house is gone now, bulldozed last month. In its place, a sprinkling of straw, a county sign, notice of hearing. The land will be rezoned R1 to R2. Instead of the iris garden we will have Iris Hills, nine single family homes.

Gone is the mint green farm house, the crumbling old shed covered in wisteria, the eye-popping iris and day lilies that made people pull off the road to see what all the fuss was about. Gone are the painters who would set up their easels there in the spring and summer. And gone most of all is Margaret, the garden's owner, who died a few years ago.

For years the place sat in limbo as the "Friends of Margaret's Garden" tried to save the flowers by turning the space into a park. But finally all options were exhausted. Now "Margaret's garden" joins a parade of places named for what they have displaced. On the same block of West Ox Road are Robaleed, a neighborhood named for a farm whose horses still hung their heads over the fence when we first moved here, and Blueberry Farm Lane, where we once picked — you've got it.

It's a strange, sad sort of duty to bear witness to the past, but it's also a privilege. Walkers see the world at four miles an hour. We notice a fresh coat of paint, a "For Sale" sign, a new car in the driveway. And because we notice, we belong.