ON IRISES. 



143 



taking the group as a whole, if you wish them to flourish, be 

 happy, and flower, let your first care be to choose for them a 

 site in which they shall feel as little as possible the winter rains 

 of our so often weeping England. Plant them upon a bank on 

 which in winter the sun's rays will if possible fall during all 

 those few hours in which we then see his face, and do not be 

 afraid if, in the glare of some unusually summerlike summer, they 

 appear to wither and to faint. Withering in winter often means 

 rot and decay, but withering in full summer for these Irises with 

 thick fleshy rhizomes means reader pour mieux sautcr : the good- 

 ness of the leaves shrinks back into the rhizome to appear in the 

 coming spring in the purple and gold of the flower. 



I have spoken so far chiefly of the Irises of Europe. Some 

 of them, as I have said, are also found in Asia, and the Asian 

 specimens, in many instances, differ but slightly or not at all 

 from the European ones. There grows in the Caucasus an 

 I. pumila identical with the European pumila, the Asian 

 I. cjermanica is distinguished by slight tokens only from the 

 European I. (jcrmanica, and I can see no difference whatever 

 between I. albicans from Smyrna and that from Spain. More- 

 over, there are Irises special to Central Asia not found in 

 Europe, which nevertheless present all the characteristics of the 

 European group of I. cjermanica. I have already mentioned 

 I. Biliottii and I. kashmiriana ; to these I may add I. Alberti, 

 which betrays its Asian nature in its strange colour, but not to 

 any great extent otherwise. In the hot arid regions of Asia is, 

 however, found a very special and very remarkable group of 

 Irises called the Oncocyclus group, because the perianth 

 segments, both the standards and the falls, are very often round 

 and curved, possessing a spherical curvature like that of a shield. 

 Of this group, which stretches from Palestine and the Egyptian 

 desert through Asia Minor and Persia to Afghanistan, where it 

 fades away, the large and striking form called I. susiana is 

 probably well known to you all. This, which has been cultivated 

 in our gardens for centuries, Parkinson describing it as the great 

 Turkey, or Chalcedonian, or Guinea Hen Floure de Luce (the 

 reason of the first name being that the plant was introduced into 

 Europe from Constantinople, and of the second the peculiar 

 colouring of the flower), derives its name from the old province 

 of Susis on the western borders of Persia, where it is said to grow 



