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iFnmunrit 
UALITY GARDENS this year is cele¬ 
brating its tenth birthday. We survey 
with great satisfaction a decade of real 
achievement in distributing the finest 
quality irises in the world to the gardens of 
America. We also are proud to have introduced 
some of the finest varieties now grown into com¬ 
merce and to the gardening world and trust that 
it shall remain our privilege and pleasure to pio¬ 
neer in the field of introducing new and improved 
varieties. 
Quality Gardens, existing for years as a pri¬ 
vate garden for pleasure only, in 1924 was made 
a small commercial business for the purpose of 
disposing of surplus stock, the increase of a fine 
collection of iris, the best obtainable in the world 
at that time, as the collection of Quality Gardens 
has remained ever since. 
Our first catalog was issued in 1925. A sur¬ 
vey of the files of our catalogs which we have 
endeavored to make each year a continued story, 
serially telling the development and increasing 
beauty of the iris, as well as our salesman in 
general, presents a record of the changing phases 
of the iris and the remarkable work done with the 
iris by the hybridizers, both here and abroad. 
The list in our first catalog seems strange, 
indeed, as compared with the iris of today. Only 
six of the Class A list of 1925 remain in the list 
of first class irises this year. These are Cardinal, 
Germaine Perthuis, Mme. Cecile Bouscant, Michel- 
line Charraire, Peerless, and Souvenir de Loetitia 
Michaud. These may now safely be considered 
all time iris, having stood the test of years and 
stern competition. 
The first sentence of our 1925 Foreword we 
think we have eminently carried out—“Our aim 
as Iris dealers is to offer for sale the most beau¬ 
tiful and best Iris which we can secure all over 
the world.” 
We feel that we have done this beyond any 
question. The continued and growing patronage 
of our friends convinces us that they have faith 
and firm belief in the last paragraph of our orig¬ 
inal Foreword and that they give us the right to 
believe we have kept this pledge. This is: “Our 
endeavor is and will be to make the word ‘Quality’ 
as used in our title, stand for something and 
mean something and not be a mere name.” 
We gladly and earnestly reiterate this pledge. 
From a small and practically a neighborhood 
business, our customers now spread over the 
world. Originally we also handled delphiniums 
and pyrethrums but the growing popularity and 
remarkable development in irises so far out¬ 
stripped these other fine perennials that in the 
course of two years of general business we were 
forced to drop them and confine our efforts to the 
steadily growing demand for irises. 
The catalog has grown continually to meet 
new developments both in the industry and in 
gardening. We added color reproductions to our 
catalog in 1929 for the first time and we are in 
some doubt as to whether this was a well advised 
innovation. We have received numerous com¬ 
plaints and also some commendation. 
We should particularly like a frank expres¬ 
sion of opinion from our customers as to what 
they think of the color work and hereby take this 
occasion to thank in advance those who will be 
kind enough to give us such an opinion which we 
are very anxious to obtain. 
We have employed the finest artists we can 
find either in the United States or Europe to paint 
the irises for reproduction. We have also tried 
color photography. Because of the fragile sub¬ 
stance of the blossom, copy for reproduction must 
be photographed where the iris blooms and the 
print be hand colored, the iris must be painted by 
an artist of unusual skill in the handling of color, 
and the reproduction is then handed on to the 
engraver. It is easy to produce a pretty picture, 
but an exact reproduction of an iris is extremely 
difficult to obtain. 
Some of our plates have been excellent and 
very close to color true. Others have not been so 
good. We have never made any suggestions of 
any kind to our artists or engravers except that 
the reproduction be made as true to color as pos¬ 
sible. An old time theory and prejudice which 
had, perhaps, some ground in the years long past 
where catalogs were not the serious propositions 
they now are, was that dealers deliberately highly 
colored their reproductions and made little at¬ 
tempt to make them as true to natural color as 
possible. Such a proceeding would be poor sales¬ 
manship and could result only in injury to the 
reputation and business of the dealer. 
Chief complaints have been made concerning 
the color plate of Pink Satin. We feel that some 
explanation of this should be made in the Fore¬ 
word although we have always explained in the 
text of the catalog that the color is too deep. At 
the time this plate was made, a tragic death in 
our family prevented our seeing the proofs before 
publication of the catalog and it had been printed 
in quantity and could not be changed. 
If there is any idea that color plates are in¬ 
cluded in this list for the purpose of deceiving or 
overpraising an iris, we want to be informed of 
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