176 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



of colour is not a thing one is born with, but which one arrives at by 

 experience, thought, and study. 



Use Irises as cut flowers, and use them well, one would like to say, 

 if you would grow fond of them. 



Another thing that is essential to encouragement is to insist on your 

 plants having a sunny position ; this will, if they be fairly well fed, 

 ensure bloom, and when bloom is assured look well after it, or your 

 winter and spring slug will do so for you. Your winter slug will drill 

 through the crown of every blooming rhizome. The spring slug and 

 snail will not let your flower-spike get one foot high. Amongst the 

 small spring-flowering plants, woodlice are often troublesome if on dry 

 banks, living under the rhizome or in the inside of old and decayed 

 ones ; they feed on the growing tips of the new roots, which thus are 

 never formed and the plant starves. The popular idea of Iris is that 

 it is one plant, and that a water-plant. Artists are great sinners in this 

 respect, for, carrying out the [tradition, they will, when circumstances 

 seem to demand it, show the£driest sunniest loving Iris of, say, the 

 uariegata section, growing cheerfully out of ten feet of water. It is not 

 all blame, however, for art people, in their ready acceptance and ap- 

 preciation of this flow T er, have done something to keep its memory green. 

 Still, look around, if you see an Iris in a garden anywhere (I mean in a 

 popular sense). What is it ? Just this — the old blue Flag, germanica, 

 and none other. This is the one Iris as yet, and it is for the dawn 

 of a better day that this wealth of very beautiful ^flowers should be 

 spread abroad. 



