THE RETICULATA GROUP 9 



In theory and in the text-books, the bee or other insect 

 pushes his way obligingly down the tunnel, collects pollen 

 on his back from the anthers, and deposits some of it on the 

 stigma in the next tunnel that he enters. In practice, how- 

 ever, the bee is apt to take short cuts, and may be observed 

 time after time forcing himself in between style and fall 

 near the base of the tunnel and so avoiding both anther and 

 stigma. Occasionally a bee is unenterprising and does the 

 expected, and then pollination is effected, if he happens to 

 have Iris pollen on his back. This, again, is a point in 

 which the text-books do not agree with fact, for a little 

 observation in the garden on a sunny day will soon prove 

 that a bee does not on each expedition from the hive con- 

 fine himself to the flowers of one particular species or genus. 



Insects cannot therefore be relied upon to fertilise Irises, 

 and the result is that, in cultivation in England at any rate, 

 only certain species set seed at all readily, and these are 

 precisely those in which a certain formation of the stigma 

 makes self-pollination not only possible, but probable and 

 even almost necessary. 



CHAPTER III 

 BULBOUS IRISES 



I. THE RETICULATA GROUP 



THIS group of winter or early spring flowering Irises 

 comprises those species in which the bulbs are covered 



