22 THE BOOK OF THE IRIS 



we now have only recently come to. For everybody 

 knows that plants may be divided into two great classes 

 those which hate and those which affect lime in the 

 soil a third class being indifferent to its presence either 

 one way or the other. When, therefore, I was led to 

 believe that any question of soil has very little indeed 

 to do with this matter, I never gave a single thought to 

 the presence or the absence of lime ; but I dwelt in my 

 mind upon drainage, upon shelter in the summer, upon 

 other things which have been referred to above to the 

 exclusion of everything else ; and I may say here that, 

 in those early days when the cultivation of Oncocyclus 

 Irises was like darkness visible, so difficult did it seem 

 to be, a chance word from Sir Michael Foster himself 

 rather helped to take me the wrong way. He wrote in 

 The Garden of November 28, 1891, about a spot near 

 Cambridge, where Iris susiana does well, " Yet there 

 must be something in the place in question, something 

 in the conditions something, perhaps, in the soil; and, if 

 so, probably something in the physical rather than in the chemical 

 nature of the soil t which determines success" etc. But this is 

 the very point on which I should now respectfully join 

 issue with him, and I dare say he has himself long since 

 found out that it may be more or less modified. It is 

 the chemical nature of the soil which I now thoroughly 

 believe to be a sine qua non if there is to be any success 

 at all with these magnificent Irises, and if this be wrong, 

 and all other things be quite right, I do not imagine that 

 much good will come to them. At any rate, for years 

 and years I and others have been " pegging away," but 

 with strange vicissitudes in the way of results. Some- 

 times I have had fine blossoms in the spring, and when 

 I thought I had got to the top of the hill, like the stone 

 of Sisyphus, I have been rolled down again to the 

 bottom ; hope has been damped over and over again 

 when it was beginning to rise very high, and I had every 



