The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

A low maintenance, yet highly rewarding secret iris garden, created and maintained by local photographer Bill Rodgers, is in its third year of bloom in Waitsburg, and it is impressive.

The sprawling garden has rhizomes that stretch their roots across the state to Mercer Island, where Rodgers originally began growing them in a community garden. He brought starts with him when he moved to College Place, where a friend let him start a garden in a private horse pasture. After moving to Waitsburg three years ago, he found the daily weeding and care needs were getting difficult to meet, so when t...