THE GENUS IRIS

First Edition: 245 pages, folio (447 x 295 mm), 48 colour plates, illustrations in the text, publisher's quarter dark greenmorocco with green cloth sides, titled gilt on the upper cover and spine, marbled endpapers,top edge gilt, other edges uncut, the paper used to print the plates is coated on one sideonly and thus the plates are in fine condition, the reverse of the plates and text are uncoatedand there is some occasional light foxing, overall a very good copy in a slip case.

William Rickatson Dykes (4 November 1877 – 1 December 1925) was an English amateur botanist who became an expert in the field of iris breeding and wrote several influential books on the subject. He was also interested in tulips amaryllis, and other plants. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rickatson_Dykes).

Dykes wrote several books on Irises. The Genus Iris remains his masterpiece, even though his system of classification has been much amended since his day. It was the first time anyone had dealt with the entire genus in a single monograph. The massive folio volumes that resulted was illustrated with 48 coloured drawings: 47 of them iris portraits by Frank Harold Round plus one plate of seeds by Miss R.M. Cardew, and thirty line drawings by C.W. Johnson. (Brent Elliott's Brief Lives, The Garden, 1992, pages 357/359.)