of our experience make no display of brilliant
colour, assuredly they have other virtues. When eburneum thrusts up its
rigid spikes, in winter or earliest spring, crowned with great ivory
blooms, the air is loaded with their perfume. I have seen a plant of
Lowianum with more than twenty garlands arching out from its thicket of
leaves, each bearing fifteen to twenty-five three-inch flowers, yellow or
greenish, with a heavy bar of copper-red across the lip. And they grow
fast. It is said that at Alnwick the Duke of Northumberland has specimens
of unknown age filling boxes four feet square; each must be a garden in
itself when the flowers open. And they last three months when
circumstances are favourable. Sometimes also--but too rarely--the greenish
yellow of Lowianum is changed to bright soft green. Nobody then could say
that the colouring is not attractive.

We have here most of the recognised species--Cymbidiums are not much given
to 'sporting': Devonianum, buff, freckled with dull crimson--lip purplish,
with a dark spot on either side; Sinensis, small, brown and yellow,
scented; Hookeri, greenish, dotted and blotched with purple; Traceyanum,
greenish, striped with red-brown, lip white, similarly dotted, and the
famous Baron Schroeder variety thereof, which arrived in the very first
consignment, but never since; pendulum, dusky olive, lip whitish, reddish
at the sides and tip; and so on.

The only hybrids of Cymbidium known to me are eburneo-Lowianum and its
converse, Lowiano-eburneum. The former is creamy yellow, with the V-shaped
blotch of its father on the lip; the latter pure white, with the same
blotch more sharply defined--which is to say, that Lowiano-eburneum is
much the better of the two. Both are represented here.

Against the glass, right and left all round, are Coelogynes of sorts.

We have another house devoted mainly to Cymbidium, in which they have been
planted out for some years, with results worth noting. I am convinced that
in a future day amateurs who put the well-being of their orchids above all
else--above money in especial!--will discard pots entirely. Every species
perhaps--every one that I have observed, at least--grows more strongly
when placed in a niche, of size appropriate, on a block of tufa. There are
objections, of course--quite fatal for those who have not abundance of
labour at command; for the compost very quickly turns sour under such
conditions if not watered with great care and ju