NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Celebrate the arrival of springtime with a stroll through the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden during the New Orleans Museum of Art’s first-ever Iris Viewing Festival on Saturday, April 4. Hundreds of new blooms planted around the lagoon this winter will reveal themselves in time for the celebration, which also will feature live music, educational demonstrations and a one-day-only contemporary art installation, Birds in the Park, by Christy Hengst of Santa Fe, N.M.

“We’re honoring a history of iris planting around this same lagoon that dates back 75 years,” said Sculpture Garden Manager Pamela Buckman. “Long before the Sculpture Garden existed this lagoon was the site of an annual iris planting that honored poet and newspaper publisher Pearl Rivers. With the help of the Louisiana Iris Society, we are now able to revive that tradition.”

Rivers was publisher of The Daily Picayune, a precursor to The Times-Picayune. She became legendary in the newspaper business for introducing gossip columns and women’s news to the South. Meanwhile, Rivers was already known throughout New Orleans for her outspokenness, as well as her penchant for finding trouble. In 1932, the Louisiana Iris Society honored Rivers by planting irises “in every hue of the rainbow” on the banks of the same City Park lagoon that the Sculpture Garden was built around.

The hundreds of irises that will bloom in the Sculpture Garden prior to the April 4 Viewing Festival also will come in a variety of colors.

Iris Viewing Festival happenings include: live music in the Sculpture Garden from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m.; propagation demonstrations with Patrick O’ Connor (Louisiana Iris Society) and Mark Schexnayder (LSU Agricultural Center); Ikebana demonstrations with Ikebana International; and the debut of a new self-guided Audio Tour of the Sculpture Garden for use on mobile phones.