ON THE CULTIVATION OF ONCOCYCLU>S IRISES. 315 



There has been quite enough of good about them to make me feel sure 

 I was on the right track — I have frequently had some very splendid 

 blossoms — and yet enough of uncertainty and imperfection remained to 

 make me long for a more decided advance. This decided advance has 

 come at last, I think, and it is that which I venture to describe to you 

 now. I can only tell you how things are with me on this head up to 

 date. It is a very odd thing, as I dare say you have noticed, how, with 

 discoveries of a magnifical and universal importance and also with those 

 of a trivial and very insignificant value, precisely the same thing seems 

 to strike different persons at the self-same time. There is no claim, of 

 course, made for the subject of these remarks that it belongs to the first 

 of these two classes. But small and trivial as it is, it illustrates a sort of 

 general law so far as it can do it. Not a few of those who were anxious 

 to know what these Oncocyclus Irises most desire to have given to them 

 altered their opinions at about the same time. It was very odd indeed 

 that we all seemed to come last autumn to think that lime in some shape 

 must be given to them so as to do well, whereas no one, so far as I know 

 anything about the business, had ever emphasised or said very much 

 about it before. This is the singularity of the whole affair. Whatever 

 Herr Max Leichtlin says to me about any horticultural matter, I accept 

 it without asking any question at all. Now, I perfectly remember his 

 saying to me at an early date when the mode of cultivation for these 

 Irises was discussed : " I do not think that the question of soil has any- 

 thing to do with success in this matter. It depends on other considera- 

 tions altogether." So after this piece of instruction I gave myself up to 

 find out what " the other conditions " demanded, and I fondly imagined 

 that good loam and perhaps some road grit would supply everything that 

 was required in the way of soil. I thought I might leave soil alone and 

 that it had been sufficiently considered. It was also noticeable in Sir 

 Michael Foster's instructions in the Garden, November 28, 1891, to which 

 I have referred above, how very little he says on this head. He only 

 incidentally notices the fact that he lives upon chalk, and his words run 

 thus : " On my own bleak chalk hill, where, in seasons other than the 

 present one, the soil, specially the subsoil," &c., but he does not at all 

 emphasise what follows from it, viz. that a good deal may be owing to 

 this, and a little lower down in his communication he even raises a doubt 

 as to whether there is any chemical efficacy about chalk with regard to 

 these Irises, for he says about a place which is near his own, and where 

 Iris susiana does well : " Yet there must be something in the place in 

 question, something in the conditions, something jjerhajjs in the soil, and 

 if so something prohabhj in the physical rather than in the chemical 

 nature of the soil which determines success," &c. But this is the very 

 point on which I should now respectfully join issufe with him. I venture 

 to submit, though this is rather antedating what has to follow, that the 

 great reasons why Oncocyclus Irises like Sir M. Foster so much are, 

 first of all, because they naturally take to one who knows so much about 

 them — but secondly, and principally, because they do affect the chemical 

 nature of the soil with which they are certainly provided in his place, 

 and not, as he in this passage suggests, because of its physical properties, 

 which are of less account with them. It is chalk or lime in some shape 



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