The Literature of the Iris 
7 
The Iris in Post-Linnaean Literature. 
After the appearance of the first edition of Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum the number of known 
Irises was increased by the results of Pallas’ journey in Northern Asia, of which an account was 
published between 1768 and 1773. The species then discovered include I. tenuifolia, /. setosa, 
I. ventricosa and I. flavissima , and a few others which at the time were wrongly identified with 
previously described plants. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century several of the groups of Irises, which we now look 
upon as subgenera, were described as genera. Thus the name Evansia was published by Salisbury 
in 1805 in the first volume of the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London, and that 
of Oncocyclus by Siemssen in Mohl und Schlecht’s Botanische Zeitung for 1846 (iv. p. 706). 
The first real attempt to classify all the known species of the genus was made by Alefeld 
and published in the Botanische Zeitung for 1863 (xxi. p. 296). In this, one group was based on 
the shortness of the standards, another on the two-pointed stigma, and even one on the length of 
the perianth tube, regardless of the other features of the plants. This last group was named 
Neubeckia, apparently for no other reason that to honour the name of a friend, who happened to 
be celebrating his hundredth birthday. As the Neubeckia group contained such totally dissimilar 
species as stylosa ( unguicularis ), reticulata , tenuifolia, scorpioides ( alata ) and humilis, it is not 
surprising that the system did not meet with general approval. 
Nine years later, in 1872, Klatt of Hamburg published a further revision of the Iris genus in 
Vol. xxx. p. 496 of the same publication. Klatt’s classification of the species was based largely 
on the character of the capsules, but this, unchecked by any regard for other characters, brought 
together such species as spuria, laevigata and graniinea, and foetidissima, ventricosa and nolha. 
Moreover, there is a presumption' that the work was done without much acquaintance with the 
living plants, and to pick out certain characters from the descriptions of different plants by different 
authors is obviously an unsatisfactory method of procedure, owing to the fact that different observers 
attach supreme importance to different features in the plants with which they are dealing. 
In 1876 Baker published a series of articles on Irises in the Gardener’s Chronicle, the matter 
of which was condensed into an article in Vol. xvi. (1877) of the Journal of the Linnaean Society. 
In this account, the bulbous species are still separated under the generic name of Xiphion, and 
subdivided in a way that left no place for such bearded bulbous species as /. Boissieri and 
I. Tubergeniana, which were not then known. 
In 1880 Maximowicz published in Vol. xxvi. of the Bulletin of the Academy of St Petersburg 
an account of the various Asiatic Irises, based to a large extent on the material collected by such 
travellers in Asiatic Russia and China, as Mme Fedtschenko, A. Regel, Przewalski, and others. 
About the same time Foster began that work among Irises as garden plants that was carried 
on until his death in 1907. Through his enterprise many species were introduced into England, 
which he obtained in many cases from Max Leichtlin of Baden Baden, and in others from 
Dr Regel of St Petersburg. 
Fosters work in the garden supplemented that of Baker in the herbarium, and in 1892 the 
latter published his final review of the Iris genus in his well-known Handbook of the Irideae. 
In this work there were brought together the references to the first publication of the various 
species and to some of the subsequent notices of them. This was a necessary preliminary to any 
real study of the genus and, if fuller knowledge of the living plants has made it impossible to 
follow very closely Baker's arrangement of the species, our debt of gratitude to him is none the 
less real. 
Baker's Handbook was written for the botanist to whom the actual flowers are often of little 
importance or interest. It remained for the Curator of the Cambridge Botanic Garden (R. Irwin 
Lynch) to put into more popular form the information therein contained. This led to the publication 
of The Book of the Iris in 1904. This in its turn was followed in 1907 by a somewhat similar treat- 
ment of the subject in French by Correvon and Mass6, which has helped to spread a knowledge of 
the genus in Continental gardens. Early in 1912 there was published in the “Present Day 
Gardening " Series a small volume dealing with Irises as garden plants. 
1 This presumption is based on a number of mistaken identifications in the herbarium of the Berlin Botanic Garden. 
