190 



The plant which has coine under observation has red colour 

 neither in the peduncle nor in the flower; and the margins of the lip 

 are not frilled, but even. 



A drawins^ has been placed in the Singapore collection. 



Habenaria Havillandi, Kranzlin. 



In 1912, Mr. J. W. Anderson, the Assistant Curator, was sent on 

 a collecting trip to Sarawak, whence he brought back a series of 

 interesting plants. One of the plants proved to be the orchid Habe- 

 iiaria Havillandi, Kranzlin. Large green flowers are always interest- 

 ing, because the number of species having them is small; 

 H. Havillandi is one of the number. The flowers, vertically from 

 the tip of the upper sepal to the tip of the labellum, measure 2 cm. ; 

 the spur is long and full of honey at the lenticular end ; the flowers 

 have a faint but pleasant scent. Many of them are open together, so 

 that in a conservatory with a setting of flowers of other colours this 

 orchid is quite conspicuous. It flowers twice a year. 



The explosive Flowers of Plocoglottis porphyrophylla, 



Ridley. 



Another orchid, brought back l)y Mr. Anderson from Sarawak, 

 proved to be Plocoglottis porphyrophylla, a plant of wide distribu- 

 tion in Malaya, but because inconspicuous and a lover of deep shade, 

 little known. The Sarawak plant carried only one flower open at a 

 time, but it remained in flower over more than three months, produc- 

 ing a fresh one every few days until the raceme was more than two 

 feet long, and had borne fifty. Specimens and drawings in the 

 Singapore herbarium indicate that sometimes two flowers may be 

 expanded at the same time; this, however, never happened in the 

 plant which came under obi-ervation. 



The flowers have a most conspicuous asymmetry, are explosive, 

 and exhibit an extraordinary series of changes, which have passed 

 undesciibed hitherto; indeed the existing descriptions of the flower 

 are quite inadequate for giving any true id^a of its appearance. Other 

 species of Plocoglottis have bilateral symmetry, and seem widely dis- 

 tinct enough from our subject. 



It is convenient to begin the description of the flower by an ac- 

 count of the half-gruwn bud. 



The ovary begins to twist, as is the way in orchids, when by its 

 growth it has overtopped the bract ; it carries the swelling bud 

 through about 75 degrees and then stops twisting. During this 

 twisting the dorsal sepal outgrows the other sepals pushing over the 

 apex of the bud. If the bud be dissected the tips of the lateral petals 

 will be found within the apex, but the lip only slightly overpasses the 

 middle of the bud. 



