flowers are produced, with creamy-white, lanceolate sepals and petals, and a three- 
lobed lip whose side lobes are white with brownish-crimson stripes, and the crested 
middle one yellow with crimson edges. It flowers in Autumn or early Winter, 
and lasts for some weeks. Ordinary bushhouse treatment in Brisbane and the 
North, and the cool part of the glasshouse in the South. 
VANDA 
The genus Vanda rivals the Dendrobiums as the most popular of the orchid 
order amongst Australian growers, and there are very few collections from which 
at least plants of V. tricolor or V. coerulea are absent. This esteem is well 
justified, for, taken by and large, as the sailors say, the Vandas are the least 
troublesome of all the orchid genera to grow, and their flowers are just as beautiful 
and better lasting than most of the Dendrobiums. The Vandas, too, are evergreen, 
and their plants are, for the most part, of pleasing appearance, even when not 
in flower, although some object to their habit of sending forth the long, aerial, 
adventitious roots that seek from sun and air the carbons necessary to build up 
their stout, erect stems They are widely distributed in longitude, latitude and 
elevation, so that in a state of nature the various species grow under widely differ- 
ing conditions. The orchid family in general has the quality of adaptability very 
strongly incorporated in its make-up, and, of all its orders, that of Vanda is not 
surpassed in this respect. Naturally it is desirable that each species be given as 
nearly as possible the conditions under which it grows naturally, but, if patience 
and care be exercised, something very remote from these natural conditions will 
eventually see Vandas growing well and flowering in due season. Despite this 
faculty of adaptability, however, it is better for growers to confine their selection 
of Vandas to those for which the conditions they can offer are reasonably suitable. 
For instance, it is courting failure (and expensive failure, too) for a grower 
living in a cold situation to try and grow Euanthe (Vanda) Sanderiana in a 
cold, damp bushhouse. On the other hand, some growers have a tendency to 
over-heat their Vandas. It is just as likely to be fatal to grow a V. coerulea in a 
hot glasshouse as it is to grow Euanthe (V.) Sanderiana in the cold bushhouse to 
which I have just referred. 
The old technique was to pot Vandas in a compost consisting entirely of crocks, 
charcoal, and a topping of sphagnum moss. The amount of nutriment in such a 
compost is just about nil, so that the plant was entirely dependent upon the 
carbons and such salts as it could extract from the atmosphere and the water 
given it. It is no wonder that Vandas lost popularity because of the high per- 
centage of mortality among their growers’ plants. In more modern times, how- 
ever, the compost for this genus has been considerably modified, and now growers 
are obtaining excellent results from a compost of good fibrous peat and good-sized 
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