208 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
plant’s requirements. Jris Kaempferi, in normal circum- 
stances, takes two full seasons, if not three, to become 
established and show its true character, no matter how 
favourable the site and soil in which it has been put. 
And some gardeners, seeing their plants apparently lan- 
guishing, although in excellent conditions, have probably 
despaired too soon, and thrown the plant up as a bad 
job ; whereas, had they been patient, the Iris would have 
come to its own in its own good time. Again, in a bad 
situation, the Iris is capable of making a wild morbid 
display in its first season, and then dying outright— 
following nature’s law by which a moribund plant tends 
to throw its expiring forces into a last desperate outbreak 
of blossom, before inevitable death descends. This trick 
is deadly and delusive, with its fallacious suggestion of 
prosperity; and some growers, finding their Irises a 
miracle of bloom the first year, and dead corpses the 
next, may be too prone to condemn the thing, offhand, 
as capricious, incalculable, and unsatisfactory. 
Now, as to the culture at Horikiri, where the summer, 
I’ll remind you, is wet and torrid, the winter dry and 
icebound. Here the Iris is grown in fields of liquid 
manure. All through the growing season water is ad- 
mitted as into a rice-field. ‘Then when the flower-buds 
are forming the water is cut off, and no more is admitted 
till the next spring, leaving the plants as dry as the 
climate will allow all through summer, autumn, and 
winter. The one thing certain is that Iris Kaempferi 
will never grow well and permanently in water, but must 
be treated as an ordinary dry-ground plant, during about 
three-quarters of its existence. From my own experience 
I should be inclined to say that the most important 
point to aim at is thoroughly efficient planting at the 
outset. Make your soil as rich as you can possibly make 
it, and as heavy too—though of course with efficient 
