An Iowa Garden

In the winter, my mind turns to the blues... not sad blues, but blue flowers, waving in the warm breezes of June. When the cold settles in for a stay, I'm not a hard sell for most any plant that I don't have, but I'm a complete chump for anything seen in the flower catalogues that is blue. The new Heronswood catalogue (I know, Burpee-Heronswood) shows Iris collettii, a rare iris which was collected "on the moist meadows of the Zhongdien Plateau of China in 2000". While it's described as being light violet blue, it's catalogue picture shows a deep, gentian blue iris with bright golden beards, and it is described as being "deliciously fragrant". Well, of course, at that point I was like a bluegill after a worm, but maybe, just maybe, I'm developing a little garden temperance, with age: I actually spent some time looking up this plant before digging out the plastic. First of all, while Heronswood says it's hardy to zone 5, I note that it is also native to Burma, Vietnam, and India; while a quick search didn't reveal anybody else commenting on collettii's hardiness, these areas of the world would not seem to have a lot of similarity to my back woods. Secondly, another grower describes it as "having no perfume to my nose"; since I have a sense of smell only slightly better than a block of wood, this would not engender much hope in me that this flower would be delighting my olfactory senses. Third, all the other pictures of this flower show a pretty standard blueish-purple flower. The deal-killer though, is that others describe its flowering with the dreaded word "fleeting". It seems its flowers only last a day, and the pictures don't seem to show a ton of buds like you might see, for example on a daylily.
However, if we go to page 22 of the Heronswood catalogue, they are offering the Asian version of our native blue cohosh, covered with dusty, Delft-blue berries...
(If you're wondering, the picture at the top is of a clump of Japanese Iris blooming in June in Shaw's Garden in St. Louis.)