MAspEVALLIA PICTURATA. 
Mount Roraima, on the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela; on the north 
the mountains of Caracas ; on the south and west Cali and Tolima in the Western and 
Central Cordilleras of Colombia, and Frontino in Antioquia ; and on the north-west 
Costa Rica. 
Specimens from these localities vary greatly in size and depth of colour. Those 
collected upon the upper slopes of Mount Roraima at an elevation of about 6,000 feet, 
during the “ Roraima Expedition” of 1884-5, flowering in November and December, are 
less than two inches in height, the colour, as far as can be judged from dried flowers, 
being much the same as in the plant here figured, while the apex of the leaves is more 
sharply denticulate, with the central tooth longer than the lateral ones. Some of these 
dried specimens were sent in 1885 by Mr. Everard im Thurn to the British Museum of 
Natural History, where Mr. H. N. Ridley, then a member of the Botanical Staff, identified 
them with JZ. picturata Rehb. f. 
On the western slopes of the Western Cordilleras of Colombia exactly similar plants 
have been found by Consul Lehmann, growing on trees in thick damp forests at an 
elevation of 5,850 feet, and flowering in April. Larger specimens were also collected by 
him near Tolima, at an elevation of 6,500 feet, growing on trees and often on dead wood 
in the damp forests of the upper Rio Cabrera, flowering in January. These plants, 
although the flowers are of darker colouring—the brown spots being almost suffused over 
the surface of the sepals—approach most nearly the variety here represented, a plant 
found near Caracas by Mr. Edward Wallace, of Colchester, in 1855, at an elevation of 
about 6,000 feet, growing on the stems and lower branches of trees. 
Plants from Frontino in Antioquia, also found growing upon forest trees (elevation 
2,500 feet), are intermediate between those from Mount Roraima and Cali, and those from 
Tolima and Caracas, closely resembling plants found in Costa Rica by Shuttleworth in 
1883. The largest form seems to be the specimen found by Fendler in Venezuela in 
1854, now preserved in the Kew Herbarium. 
A nearly allied species, at present un-named, has been found by Consul Lehmann 
in the mountains of Cauca, growing on trees in rather thick forests above Chapa on the 
Tambo at an elevation of 6,500 feet. The plant is only about one inch in height, and has 
white flowers with yellow spots and an orange lip. A single dried specimen of this little 
plant is preserved in the Boissier Herbarium at Chambésy, Geneva. 
There is but little variation in the temperature of the different localities in which 
M. picturata is found, the annual average being from 59° to about 67° Fahrenheit. 
Owing to the delicacy of the species, many attempts to import it alive have totally 
failed. Of four thousand plants collected in 1885 by Mr. Edward Wallace, with which 
he started on his homeward voyage, only forty reached Europe alive. Messrs. Sander of 
St. Albans have also succeeded in importing living plants, and the first flowers seen in 
England were those in their collection described by Professor Reichenbach in 1882, in 
the Gardeners’ Chronicle, pt. I. p. 10. 
