IRIS. 
work of growth, and break stemless into living explosions and ragged 
bombs of pure bursting colour in the first dawn of the year, when the 
raw earth is far too dead and bare, it seems, to be pregnant of such 
outbreaks without a miracle—and when,therefore, they stand no chance 
at the hands of wind and worms and slugs and birds and weather, 
unless they have the kindly shelter of a glass to reward them for their 
excessive promptitude in glorifying a world not yet sufficiently awake 
and comfortable to gratify them with a welcome warm and dry ; 
though it seems hard, indeed, that the muddy tears of dying winter 
should wreck the first babies of spring, Caesarian-born from earth in 
its darkest dankest hour. Therefore, even if bulbs have to be bought 
every year, their beauty and opportuneness is such, and the expense 
so small, that indeed it need not be grudged ; while J. reticulata— 
which has the most beautiful varieties, including one rather restric- 
tively called Cambridge, whose colour is not that of Cambridge alone 
but that of the finest pale summer-dawn of gold and turquoise that 
the world ever saw—lI. reticulata, I say, will continue to live and 
prosper and multiply in the open like a Squill if suited ; and is even 
the better for being relieved in autumn, every two or three years, 
from the overcrowding mass of its own bulbs. Alas, that so much 
cannot be said for I. persica ; it is older in England than the Divine 
Right of Kings, but in three centuries has almost grown as weakly 
and ragged and rare as that other alien importation, so much less 
perdurable and precious. 
These are all bulbs; of tubers let the rock-garden have (if it can 
get it) the true I. pumila, as rare as the Dodo, in despite of catalogues 
unanimous in offering it. Of this, too, let it have the best coerulean 
blue form, not the grey one; let it avoid the soaked old-blotting- 
paper-coloured J. p. gracilis, in spite of its sweet scent ; let it seek out 
golden little J. minuta from the Far East, and blue-and-white dainty 
I. ruthenica (some of whose varieties, however, do not seem to flower 
at all). Then there are J. cristata and its variety from the Great Lake- 
shores of America, J. lacustris, both of quickly-creeping habit and the 
rarest crimpled powder-blue-and-golden beauty of blossom—Z. lacus- 
tris being the bluer and deeper, but also the more minute and precious. 
And yet another North-American is I. verna, with wide clumps of 
sword-shaped tiny leaves, and exquisite fragrant and abundant starry 
Trises of blue and violet and gold in early summer. This, as sent out, 
is usually so divided as to have no root or vigour left, but solid unhewn 
clumps of a foot across have only to be planted in cool rich soil in a 
moist and shady aspect to go ahead with all the vigour of I. pseuda- 
corus. The Californian Irises have a different temper, and a sunset 
437 
