WONDER WOMEN AIS WOMEN WHO HAVE WON THE DYKES MEDAL
BY JIM MORRIS, MISSOURI AND CATHY EGERER, MICHIGAN
We bet you do not know how many women in
America have won the Dykes Medal, do you? Some
might say one or two, some others three or four, but
how many know it is at least ten and possibly eleven!? 1
The most recent female winner was Marky Smith
of Region 13, Yakima, Washington, in 2008 for her
intermediate bearded (IB) iris ‘Starwoman’ (1998),
an historic break-through event for median irises.
Technically the Dykes Medal is awarded to an Iris,
but the hybridizer/registrant normally receives the
medal at the AIS Awards Banquet at convention in the
year following voting by the AIS judges. The medal is
provided by the British Iris Society to AIS and the AIS
Awards chairman has it engraved for presentation.
The Iris must have been hybridized, registered and
introduced by an American. Dykes medals are also
awarded in Great Britain, Australia/New Zealand, and
formerly in France.
My original and casual search on this topic began in
2004 while researching median iris history and people
for the Median Iris Society’s 50th Anniversary History
Edition of The Medianite, published in 2007. While
researching Longfield Iris Farm in Bluffton, Indiana,
and its owner E. F. (Bruce) Williamson, I uncovered
irrefutable evidence that the 1940 Dykes Medal was
awarded to his daughter Mary Williamson.
Even though the AIS Golden Anniversary Bulletin
Issue of January 1970 erroneously attributes ‘Wabash’
(1936, TB) to her father, I became curious of certain
facts in the record. First Bruce Williamson kept few
breeding records, used mixed pollen, and often-times
hired high school students to actually make profuse
and indiscriminate crosses. They sowed seeds by the
thousands. In contrast, Mary Williamson (who later
ran the farm after her father’s death in 1933) kept
records and recorded the ‘Wabash’ cross as Dorothy
Dietz X Cantabile 2, registered and introduced in 1936
three years after her father’s death. She accepted the
Dykes Medal in 1941 at the Nashville, Tennessee, AIS
Convention.
First American women to win the Dykes Medal1
1936 ‘Mary Geddes’ (Stahl.-Wash. 1931, TB)
Mary Geddes Stahlman - Thomas A. Washington (Mrs.?)
1940 ‘Wabash’ (Mary Williamson 1936, TB)
‘Mary Geddes’ (Stahl.-Wash. 1931, TB)
‘Wabash’ (Mary Williamson 1936, TB)
48 AIS Bulletin Fall 2017