Passalong plants are handed from one gardener to another, and they’re my favorite kind. It generally means that they’re resilient enough to take the Texas weather and they’ll thrive enough that someone has to actually get rid of them. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of dollars I’ve lost when my expensive Japanese aralias, hostas, heuchera, and hellebores have succumbed to drought. But all of the passalongs I’ve received are doing just fine. (Except for the ferns I plucked from my aunt’s house in Houston; it’s just not humid enough for them here.)

Texas is pretty dreadful for the type of gardens I prefer, but there is one flower that likes it here: irises. I’ve been daydreaming about a pathway lined with irises for about six months now, so I devised a little trick to get some for free. This works well for anything that you’d like to get for free, actually…