been separated from the planting stock and have been run through 
very expensive mechanical grading processes. They have been 
counted, packed in sacks and again in wooden crates. With all this 
expense before a single bulb is marketed, the grower can hardly be 
expected to spend much time or money in merchandising his crop. 
He is apt to sell it through the five or six large jobbers of quality 
bulbs that exist in this country. ‘The jobbers, in turn, cater mainly 
to the commercial florists who buy in large quantities for cash. 
Cultural problems, then, call for expensive machinery which 
again must be supported by large acreages in order to be profitable. 
The high cost of production of the bulbs plus the still higher cost 
of production for the flowers, when forced during winter, all call 
for the greatest possible economy all along the line. ‘That economy 
can best be achieved both by the bulb grower and by the florist 
by concentrating on as few varieties as possible and preferably on 
only one variety. With one variety only to consider, the habits of 
growth, the dates of flowering and of maturity will all be identical 
and crops can thus be timed to best advantage. All these factors 
then have tended to lessen the number of varieties produced. It is 
equally true that they have been instrumental in increasing the 
number of bulbs grown of each variety, which, in turn, has made 
it possible to lower prices. 
In concentrating on a single variety it is obvious that the demand 
of the commercial florist must be the controlling factor in its 
selection. He buys iris bulbs, not by the hundreds, but by the 
hundreds of thousands and orders placed by the leading bulb job- 
bers for several million bulbous iris are not rare. ‘The total demand 
of the public for iris for garden decoration is not more than 5% 
of the total used for forcing and hence it plays a comparatively 
small role. The florist wants an iris that forces easily, that lends 
itself to timing for special holidays and requires little space in the 
greenhouse. ‘The variety that by common consent is the best for 
this purpose is the I. tingitana hybrid, WEepGEWwoop, raised before 
World War I in our nursery in Leiden, Holland, and, by now, un- 
doubtedly the most widely grown and popular bulbous iris. 
It is interesting to note, in passing, that at the time it was our 
aim to produce an iris for the garden rather than for forcing or 
for the greenhouse. WEDGEWoop and its companion seedling THE 
First were judged to be rather unattractive for the garden, mainly 
because of their typical I. tingitana foliage, very wide and soft so 
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