24 THE BOOK OF THE IRIS 



been known there during the last twenty years. And 

 this is the way in which the great change for good came 

 about so far as I am concerned. 



A friend of mine who is fond of flowers took it into 

 his head to grow Oncocyclus Irises, and as he knew little 

 about the difficulties of the task he used the first soil that 

 came to his hand luckily he was adding a wing to his 

 house and heaps of old mortar and such like were lying 

 about the place of which he freely availed himself. I 

 noticed when the flowering time came round in the 

 following spring that he had largely succeeded, and his 

 Irises gave him better results than mine did, with much 

 less of care. I then bethought me of what I had heard 

 before, which tended the same way. Mr Potter, the 

 foreman of Messrs Backhouse at York, has to do with 

 two gardens, one in Oxfordshire and the other in York. 

 In the former of these two gardens (at Witney, I think), 

 Iris iberica grows like a weed ; in the other it will not 

 grow at all : and he can only account for it by saying, in 

 the one place it meets with plenty of lime, in the other 

 it has none and when I was thinking of all this and 

 trying to put two and two together I received a letter 

 from a friend in which these words occur : " From what 

 I can see of my Oncocyclus Irises this year and the past 

 season, I get more and more convinced that the want of 

 lime in our soils is one of the chief causes of failure in 

 their cultivation, &c., &c." Here was a revelation 

 indeed, and it all tallied with my own reflections at the 

 same time suspicions were excited which could not easily 

 be laid to rest, and which were strengthened from day to 

 day. 



E. J., a correspondent to whom I had written about 

 the matter, sent me word to the effect that he had met 

 Mr Potter in travelling by rail, who had said that not 

 only does Iris iberica continue to exist when it is growing 

 in chalky soil, but it cannot be killed in it. This seemed 



