8o PRESENT-DAY GARDENING 



care for the less garish beauties of the tiny /. rubromar- 

 ginata, with deep red edges to its leaves and curious, 

 lurid flowers. 



Other Irises still rarer are kumaonensis and Hookeriana, 

 both from the Himalayas, where whole upland valleys seem 

 in some districts to be thick with them. The former 

 especially is very desirable, for a little clump no more than 

 four inches across may send up half-a-dozen flowering 

 shoots from which, while the leaves are still quite short, 

 burst out the curiously mottled red- or blue-purple flowers 

 with their thick beards of white silky hairs tipped with yellow 

 or orange. No one seems to know why it is that nearly all 

 Himalayan Irises have flowers mottled with two shades of 

 the same colour ; it is a very peculiar characteristic, and 

 found in /. Milesii and in /. goniocarpa as well as in the two 

 just-mentioned species. These latter both need moisture 

 from March to October and all the sun that they can get. 



Our tale of dwarf rock-garden Irises is nearly ended, 

 but we have yet to introduce the most fairy-like of all, /. 

 gracilipes. This slender, beautiful little species comes from 

 open glades in cool woods in Japan. In dealing, however, 

 with Japanese plants we must always remember that the 

 Japanese sunlight seems to be of a different quality to our 

 own. Growth ripens in woods there that need almost full 

 sun here. Gracilipes, for instance, will here succeed well 

 in moist vegetable soil in any position where it is shaded 

 from the sun for about half the day, but does not like a 

 wholly shaded position. This does not mean that it must 

 be overhung, for dripping moisture would prove fatal to it, 

 but in an open space between small shrubs at the edge of 

 a peat bed it does well. There the rooting medium is cool 



