118 LUTHER BURBANK 



opportunities for development, and any one of 

 which will serve quite as well as another for the 

 commencement of your tests of the possibilities of 

 plant development. Take, for example, the 

 familiar iris, known sometimes as the rainbow 

 plant. There are specimens of it, in one variety 

 or another, growing in almost every garden. It 

 makes its own way if given the slightest oppor- 

 tunity, and its unusual flower with the graceful 

 recurved fringed petals has retained its popu- 

 larity generation after generation, notwithstand- 

 ing the coming of many new favorites. 



My own work with the iris has had to do 

 largely with a Japanese species known as Iris 

 Icevigata. On an acre of damp ground that I 

 have at Sebastopol, great quantities of these 

 flowers were raised a few years ago. The com- 

 bination of colors was beautiful beyond descrip- 

 tion, varying in all shades of the rainbow. 

 Among the seedlings were numbers that pro- 

 duced double flowers, and sometimes the double 

 ones took on handsome and unusual shapes; in 

 other cases the anomalies of form were grotesque 

 and even monstrous, rather than beautiful. 



Some of the seedlings produced almost ten 

 times as many flowers as others, the individual 

 blossoms being of equal size. Some were tall and 

 lanky and could hardy support themselves when 



