Louisiana Iris

Anne Gisleson is the author of The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, and several anthologies. She lives in New Orleans.

"With the curiosity and wonderment of the early naturalists, Anne Gisleson unearths the long history of Louisiana's most iconic flower and reveals how its fate-dredged, bulldozed, mown over, and yet with community care still miraculously blooming-may not be so different from our own. Louisiana Iris is both an ode and an adventure story, peopled with bushwhackers and aunts, stretching through the parishes. Gisleson introduces us to the iris of 'deep time,' the plant that reveals fissures of geography and race, maps the gardens of ghosts, and points a gloriously blue finger at the environmental assault on our collective survival. Yet what drives this elegant book is a sense of awe that something so exquisite still appears wild among us."-Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Weeds and The Maltese Version "Anne Gisleson captures the iris capital of the universe in all its rainbow-hued glory, where rare rhizome chasers and swamp-scavenging naturalists put the cult in cultivars. Succumb to this florescent book-The Orchid Thief dropped in the ditches of south Louisiana-and let the iris take hold."-Rien Fertel, author of Brown Pelican "Louisiana Iris is far more than a book about a flower. It is a love letter to Louisiana itself, where swamps, bayous, family memories, and forgotten histories intertwine among the petals of a native bloom. Anne Gisleson writes with the eye of a naturalist and the heart of a poet, carrying readers through misty wetlands and storied landscapes where each iris reveals a new thread in the tapestry of the state's identity. And be warned: don't open this book unless you have time to finish it. Like the Louisiana iris itself, it catches hold of your imagination, drawing you ever deeper into its world until you find yourself unable to set it aside, carried page by page to the final phrase. Lyrical, deeply researched, and profoundly moving, this book lingers like the brief but unforgettable flowering season of the iris itself, blooming in the reader's imagination long after the final page is turned."-Joe W. Willis, LSU AgCenter horticulture agent