Beauty is truth and truth beauty, as the poet Keats once said and local iris aficionado Mike Lockatell would seem to have cornered the market on both.

The beauty is in his iris beds, an explosion of delicate blossoms spread out over an acre on Cosby Rd.

The truth, which has taken Lockatell a few lifetimes’ worth of sweat and toil to learn, is this: Mother Nature, in all her glory, can be one tough dame.

Lockatell moved quickly through his flowers last Wednesday, pausing every few steps to examine a bloom and zero in on variations the untrained eye would easily miss.

Lockatell is more than just an avid gardener; he is presently the reblooming bearded iris chairman for the American Iris Society Region Four, which included West Virginia, North Carolina Maryland and Virginia.

He is also an American Iris Society certified garden judge. This allows him to know the difference, say, between a tall bearded iris and a Siberian iris and the particular needs of each type. It also means Lockatell knows all the potential threats—from crummy weather to insect damage—to his precious plants.

Lockatell was readying the garden for the visitors he hopes will come and tour the space this Sunday (see sidebar). And there was plenty of reading to do.

The energetic New Jersey native would be leaving me in his dust if there was any dust to speak of, but the ground was saturated, one more thing that had him concerned.

“These rains are not helping me too much,” he said, dismayed. “Nine consecutive weeks of rain for somebody who does this kind of work—that’s the kiss of death.”

Lockatell worries about the weather and he worries about last year’s warm winter, which pushed up the bloom sequence by as much as two weeks ahead and placed them at risk of frost. Still, he’s been at this long enough to know that there are some things it does little good to wring your hands over.

“As you get older you realize it’s easier to work with nature than against it,” he said, gazing out over a rainbow of blooms.

The formal name of the space is the Joyce Lockatell Memorial Garden, named in honor of Lockatell’s mother who passed away after a battle with cancer in May of 1996.

If he’s willing to let nature win some of the battles, there are certain things he’s not willing to give up on.

For the past eight years, Lockatell has devoted himself to the study and cultivation of the somewhat mysterious reblooming irises, plants that bloom once in the spring and again in the fall.

After learning of the pioneering work being done by Dr. Lloyd Zurbrigg, who had been working for fifty year to help popularize the use of the plants in landscape design, Lockatell took an interest in the research himself.

Zurbrigg soon became Lockatell’s mentor, and the two set about the difficult, often frustrating task of creating a type of reblooming iris that would bloom earlier in the season.

There are no guarantees in nature, and Lockatell has learned to weather the challenges and the disappointments with grace.

“To succeed in this you can’t have too many expectations,” he said. “You just have to learn to roll with the punches.”

Concerning those punches, Lockatell has taken a few on the chin in recent years. In 2005, he learned he would need to move his first garden from its previous location in Flat Rock to a new space.

Lockatell said he was very fortunate that local retired dairy farmer Gabe Cosby, whose wife Joan was a fellow member of the Powhatan Garden Club, stepped in and allowed him to rent the Cosby Rd. property., but there was still the task of moving nearly 5000 plants from one location to the other.

There have been other, more personal challenges as well.

Zurbrigg was diagnosed with liver cancer in the fall of 2004. Just before Christmas in 2004, Lockatell himself was diagnosed with a malignant form of skin cancer and required surgery.

Though Lockatell would eventually make a full recovery, his mentor and friend “Doc” succumbed to cancer in early 2005, leaving Lockatell emotionally shattered.

Though he described the time as an uphill battle, Lockatell persevered.

“You have to learn to dig down deep and find your will to continue,” he said. “And it’s hard. I sacrificed a lot to get a second chance—most people would have quit.”

Lockatell says he does the work now in part to carry on Zurbrigg’s research, so that the pioneering work he did will not be lost.

More than the beauty of the blooms or the recognition of his accomplishments, Lockatell said he hopes to be remembered someday for the legacy he will be leaving to others after him.

“It’s not monetary success that is your epitaph in this business,” he said. “It’s the plants you leave behind.”