HOW TO SUCCEED 29 
thinned out graduallyasthe plants become crowded. 
Perennials, on the other hand, have spreading 
root systems that, after the second year or so, are 
more or less readily separated by either pulling or 
cutting them apart; bulbs separate automatically. 
The roots of perennials are sometimes a spreading 
network of fibre; again the system is largely con- 
centrated in a fleshy stock, a tuber, a rhizome or 
a bulb. 
It is essential to learn these things, for the 
reason that knowledge of plant life below ground, 
as well as above, is no inconsiderable factor in 
successful cultivation. 
Associate a plant with its class and characteris- 
tics at the very outset. Do not be content with 
half knowledge; you get nowhere with that. If 
some one gives you a plant of purple German iris 
that you had admired when it was in bloom, do not 
begin by thinking of it as a lovely purple flower with 
three petals curved upward and three in falls. 
Think of it as a perennial—ask if you are ig- 
norant—with, as you can see for yourself, roots 
of a rhizomatous character. If you have not 
learned that in nature such roots grow horizon- 
tally and near the surface of the ground, some- 
times showing a little above it, find that out, too, 
by inquiry. 
Very soon the observation of these details and 
their merger into a comprehensive whole becomes 
second nature; you know a plant as an individual 
without any more process of reasoning than when 
