314 JOUENAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 



ON THE CULTIVATION OF ONCOCYCLUS IRISES. 



By the late Rev. H. Ewbank, M.A., F.R.H.S. 



[A very melancholy interest attaches to this paper. It vas icrittcn 

 during Mr. Eiohank's last illness, and icas corrected for the press as he 

 lay up)on his deathbed, and less^ than a iceek before he died. He was a 

 true and ardent lover of flowers and of all ptlant life, always seeking to 

 knoto them and their ways better and still better — ever learning even to 

 the end — and ahvays quilling to communicate his knowledge, but so humble 

 that he thought he had little to bestow, whereas in reality his mind was 

 iconderfully furnished loith unfailing stores of knoicleclge draivn from 

 the deep loells of personal experience and constant observation. He will 

 be a great, cdmost irreparable loss to amateur gardeners here. He surely 

 will be loelcomed in those other gardens where neither plants nor those 

 that tend them experience disease or ill. — Ed.] 



The Secretary will bear me witness, I know, that I have never had any 

 thought of instructing the members of the Royal Horticultural Society 

 on this rather difficult subject, and if he had not urged me to retail my 

 experience I should never have done it. I confess to being excessively 

 interested in it, and I have been so for a long time ; and it does happen 

 that there is one point about which, according to my present ideas, some 

 very considerable light has been vouchsafed to me of late, and this I am 

 ready to lay before the Society now ; or, to put the same thing in a rather 

 different way, I will explain the point at which several of us have arrived. 

 My readers must kindly understand that Sir ]\Iichael Foster and Herr 

 Max Leichtlin have been my special instructors, and I do not think I 

 have deviated in principle from what the former laid down in his article 

 in the Garden, November 28, 1891, and also in visits which I have paid 

 to him, or from what fell from the lips of the latter on different occasions 

 at Baden-Baden. My own article in the Garden, September 1, 1894, was 

 little more, and it certainly never laid claim to being anything more, than 

 the application of their theories to my own practice in the Isle of Wight. 

 And now for results. They have been of a very varied description. I do not 

 think that I have ever been without a fair number of blossoms ; it has 

 been sometimes more and sometimes less ; in some years I have been 

 greatly delighted with success and I imagined that the whole thing had 

 been done, and then my expectations were dashed and I have not met 

 with the improvements I desired. It is, however, only right to say that 

 my garden is a sort of horticultural trial ground, and I should occasionally 

 have done better than was the case if I had been content to let well alone ; 

 but I have constantly gone in for improvement, and improvement has 

 not always come off. One year I severely injured my whole collection 

 and I lost a great many Irises through an experiment for which I thought 

 there was justification, but the event show^ed plainly enough it was not 

 so. Results, therefore, have often been of a rather mixed description. 



