Albuquerque and Aril Iris Society (AAIS)

We are all about growing iris!  As a local affiliate of the American Iris Society, a national organization, we are dedicated to the education, proliferation, and sharing of all things IRIS.

We have our own website at AAIS

We have an annual juried Iris Show  in the spring, and an Iris Sale in the summer, both open to the public at no charge. We meet several times a year with interesting and educational programs to learn and understand more about irises.  Hands on demonstrations, and other “How To” programs presented annually as well.

 2024 Highlights

Highlights of our Year:  In April we participated in the Garden Center’s Spring Plant Sale by offering potted iris. This is our second year of doing this, and both years we almost sold out the first day. It also offers us more exposure to encourage other gardeners to get involved in growing iris, and we gained a few new members. It’s success in thanks to Eva Barry, Candy Scott and a few others who saved rhizomes from last year’s sale, and acquired some from other sources, and planted them in pots in anticipation of this sale.

This year we went back to holding our Iris Show on Mother’s Day, and it was a big success, with 15 exhibitors and 67 entries, although many of our gardens had already finished blooming.  Attendance was excellent; it seems a perfect place to bring Mom after you’ve taken her out to lunch! Cindy Rivera won Best Specimen of Show and the Silver Metal for the most blue ribbons, and Eva Barry won the Bronze Metal for second most blue ribbons. This was our first year to have a judged Artistic Division, and had excellent participation, with Patricia Randall winning Best Artistic Design. We are always grateful to our Judges for also sharing their knowledge with us.

AAIS participated in the Garden Center’s annual sanctioned Flower Show June 14/15 with entries from several members (of note was Jody Kennedy’s entries all won blue ribbons.) Plus we participated in the club competition with a table setting for four with the theme of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (the theme of this year’s show was “All That Jazz” highlighting the 1920s & 30s).

One of the most fun things we do is our hands-on program in June showing how to divide and process iris in anticipation of our sale. After trial and era prior years, we now use doggie wading pools to contain most of the mess (this year we actually used three) and members bring some of their gnarliest clumps of iris for us to use to demonstrate. After giving the demo first, we then open the process to all attendees, who crowd around each pool and attack the challenge with enthusiasm! The final treat is participants get to take the rhizomes home.

We meet at the Albuquerque Garden Center for four regular meetings in February, March, June, and September annually.  Our shows and rhizome sales are also held at the Garden Center, and we have a fifth meeting at a member’s home in April on how to prepare iris entries for the show. Our September meeting is our Rhizome Raffle, where a club order, recently from Superstition Gardens, is raffled off for $5 a ticket, with every ticket holder guaranteed a potted recently-introduced iris.  Eva Barry potted the club order. Elections are also held a at our September meeting. 

At our August meeting, we had our annual drawing for the new iris rhizomes we had ordered in the spring from two different growers, Mid-America and Superstition. By paying the grower a set dollar amount, but giving them the freedom to select the iris, we got over 50 rhizomes, most of them being recent introductions. We were able to provide these free of charge to our members. They certainly earned it with all their hard work for the many events we had this year!

AAIS has a holiday party in December where we have an awards program, installation of officers and white-elephant gift exchange.  There is lots of laughs and lots of gift-snitching.