ON IRISES. 



145 



peacefully at rest and dormant, covered and protected by a warm 

 white shawl of snow, which shields them against both the cold 

 of night and the alluring heat of a bright winter's sun. When 

 the snow melts in spring they suddenly awake to a hurried life, 

 made almost furious as the quickly-increasing heat of the 

 mounting sun, working in the laboratories of their fresh young 

 leaves, turns into wine the water which they readily draw from 

 the stores supplied by the melting snows. Unfolding their always 

 striking and often gorgeous flowers, they hold them up aloft to 

 be seen by the equally strange insects which are flitting about 

 beneath the same strong sun. Such a bright life must needs be 

 brief. The water is soon gone, the leaves grow flabby, wither, 

 and die, and long before the summer sun has run his course, the 

 plant, exhausted with its dance of spring, has sunk into a 

 summer slumber, from which it peacefully passes into its 

 winter's sleep. 



If, as 1 said at the beginning of my remarks, it ought to be 

 the gardener's care to imitate, as far as lies in his power, the 

 conditions under which the plant which he wishes to grow lives 

 in its native home, is it to be wondered that the Irises of this 

 group are the despair of the English gardener ? How can we 

 imitate conditions such as I have just sketched in a country like 

 our own, where the rain comes down in torrents in mid-winter 

 and at harvest time, but needs praying for in spring, where the 

 days in winter are often summer-like, and the days in summer 

 are made dreary by winter-like skies and chilled by wintry blasts, 

 and where the best that can be said of the weather is that it can 

 never disappoint us because we never know what to expect ? 

 Indeed, we cannot look for more than a moderate success in 

 attempting to cultivate Irises belonging to these two groups. 

 There are, it is true, more things in the plant and in the soil 

 than are dreamt of in the latest philosophy of our newest 

 botany, and in some happy gardens these Irises will, I know, 

 not only grow, but flourish and smile with content under con- 

 ditions which must be wholly different from those obtaining in 

 their native home, but which, for some reasons as yet hidden 

 from us, are suited to the plants. Such conditions are not to be 

 found in my own poor garden, and I can only secure success, 

 and that a very limited one, by a clumsy imitation of a Central 

 Asia climate. The principle of this I learnt from the Gardening 



