LUTHER BURBANK 



common garden flowers that offer interesting op- 

 portunities for development, and any one of which 

 will serve quite as well as another for the com- 

 mencement of your tests of the possibilities of 

 plant development. Take, for example, the famil- 

 iar iris, known sometimes as the rainbow plant. 

 There are specimens of it, in one variety or an- 

 other, growing in every garden. It makes its way 

 if given the slightest opportunity, and its some- 

 what lily-like flower with the graceful recurved 

 fringed petals has retained its popularity genera- 

 tion after generation, notwithstanding the coming 

 of many new favorites. 



My own work with the iris has had to do largely 

 with a Japanese species known as Iris laevigata. 

 On an acre of damp ground that I have at Sebas- 

 topol, I raised great quantities of these flowers a 

 few years ago. The combination of colors was 

 beautiful beyond description, varying in all shades 

 of the rainbow. Among the seedlings were num- 

 bers that produced 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 beau- 

 tiful. 



Some of the seedlings produced almost ten 

 times as many flowers as others, the individual 

 blossoms being of equal size. Some were tall and 



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