HARDY BULBOUS AND TUBEROUS FLOWERS. 



on many soils to have a spring garden of these flowers, naturally 

 grouped and massed, set in turf, and giving us many flowers for the 

 house as well as pictures in lawn and meadow. For this purpose what 

 is chiefly wanted is that the bulb growers should offer the best hardy 

 sorts for the wild garden by the thousand at low rates. These 

 precious early flowers will also have their place in the garden for cut 

 flowers or the nursery bed, where the many new forms of Narcissi 

 raised in England must take their place until they become plentiful. 

 The true hardiness of the flower allows of its being enjoyed in all 

 parts of these scattered islands, from Scilly, where it is grown in 

 quantities for the markets, to the north of Scotland. In Ireland the 

 Narcissus is at home, and there are excellent collections in the 

 College Botanic Gardens at Dublin and also at Glasnevin, while there 

 is a very well-grown one at Cork, and Miss Currie, of Lismore, grows 

 many of the most precious kinds. In old days the white Narcissi 

 grown in the gardens spread here and there into orchards and fields, 

 and so it happens that now we have to seek in Ireland some of the 

 graceful white Narcissi. 



Iris. — The Iris is one of the oldest of our garden flowers, in many 

 forms too, but, like the Lily, it has come to us in greater novelty and 

 beauty of recent years, and as districts in Central Asia and Asia 

 Minor are opened to collectors, we must have our Iris gardens too. 

 And what so fair as an Iris garden ? They are the Orchids of the 

 north, many of them as hardy as reeds, and with more richness of 

 colour than Orchids. The old Irises of our gardens are usually of 

 the Germanica class ; there is much variety among these groups, and 

 they are very hardy and precious, and excellent for the adornment of 

 gardens and even walls and thatched roofs, as we see in France, the 

 Iris of this great group having a valuable power of thriving on such 

 surfaces as well as on good soil. 



There is a group of waterside and water-loving Iris, much less seen 

 in our gardens than the above, and some of them not yet come to us, 

 but of great value. They are allied to the common yellow Iris of our 

 watercourses, but are taller and richer in colour, the golden Iris 

 (Aurea), Monnieri, and Ochroleuca being the best known so far, and 

 very free, hardy, and beautiful plants they are, thriving, too, almost 

 anywhere, but best in rich, moist soil. And we have the distinct gain 

 of the splendid Japanese Iris, in its many strange forms, the Japanese 

 surpassing all waterside Irises in its wide range of colour, though most 

 beautiful perhaps in its simple forms, white and purple. This plant, 

 though its beauty suggests that of the tropics, will grow side by side 

 with our great water dock by any lake side or even in a clay ditch, 

 where only the coarsest weeds live. The Siberian Iris and the forms 

 near it are very graceful beside streams or ponds, either in open or 



