CYPRIPEDIUM. 
one great race which is supreme alike in the open and under cover, 
deserves full treatment to itself. The hardy Slippers are all lovers 
of copse-wood, forest, or rough open grassy places on the high hill- 
sides of Asia and America. A glance at their root-masses should show 
the nature of the mistake that is often made in their culture, and 
has sometimes earned them a bad name. For it will at once be seen 
that the roots never descend, but spread in radiating masses in the 
superficial soil alone. That superficial soil is always of a light or close 
vegetable nature, and this supplies the plant with all the sustenance and 
anchorage it needs, while the vegetable decay of each season provides 
it with exactly the sheltering and stimulating top-dressing that it 
wants. Accordingly the hint should be taken in the garden; no 
matter what the substratum of the bed, its surface should be filled 
with some 5 or 6 inches of rich loose soil-compost, including peat, 
leaf-mould, sand, loam and lime-chips; and in these the clump should 
be planted so shallowly that next year’s growth-buds appear above 
the ground. No winter will harm their tightly dormant innocence, 
while the plant itself will spread happily along the surface soil and 
soon form a handsome colony. One of my finest specimens of C. 
hirsutum flourished for long in a stiff and sunny bank of hard loam 
(where it had originally been “heeled in”’ and forgotten), but was killed 
at last one winter because soil fell upon it in the course of various 
earth-workings to the depth of some 3 or 4 extra inches, and was not 
removed. All Slippers bloom in early summer, and all can only be 
propagated by careful division of the clumps in early autumn, except 
in the case of the Japanese C. speciosum, which has the kind- 
ness to accept an English insect and form fat pods of seed. See 
Appendix. ; 
C. acaule is a strange and notable American species, exceedingly 
abundant in coppices and open places of the woods. It sends up only 
a pair of thick soft leaves, nerved with some three or five veined lines ; 
up from this proceeds a naked stem of 6 or 8 inches, carrying a single 
large flower, with brownish-purple sepals and petals, and a huge 
shoe-shaped bag of soft rose, with a peculiar fold down the middle of 
the front. Very rarely a most beautiful pure albino is found, with 
the petals and sepals gone chrome yellow and the lip of snowy white ; 
less rarely, pallid and almost pure-white varieties. In cultivation 
with us this species is sometimes, for reasons known only to itself, 
not quite resistent to winter damps; it should accordingly have sandy 
soil and a sheltered place, and be tucked under the filmy wing of Pinus 
montana or some such kindly evergreen growth, not too dense. 
C. arietinum is hardly ever seen in gardens, and is not at all common 
258 
