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Spanish Iris

Iris Xiphium.

THERE are two species of iris so nearly alike both in name and nature that beginners are apt to consider them as one and the same. One is called the English iris (I. Xiphioides), the other is the Spanish iris (I. Xiphium). Both are natives of the Peninsula. They belong to Spain, Portugal, and the Pyrenees, and by the men of science are regarded as scarcely specifically distinct. But in a work of this kind we must not enter into scientific questions except in a very superficial way, and it must suffice us to show, not how these two so-called species spring, as it were, from one root, but how they may be distinguished by the amateur who desires to derive from his garden some useful knowledge.