362 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 499. 



area of country, nothing can be done to prevent injury, 

 but when the fall of temperature is slight, either the smudge 

 or the water method, or both together, will prevent injury, 

 which would almost certainly occur if nothing were done. 



Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. 



M. G. Kams. 



Foreign Correspondence. 

 Grammatophyllum speciosum. 



SIR TREVOR LAWRENCE exhibited a full-sized spike 

 of flowers of this, the largest of all known Orchids, at 

 the last meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society. It 

 was, of course, awarded a first-class certificate, and to this 

 was added a gold medal for the cultivator, Mr. White, 

 under whose skillful management the rich collection ot 

 Orchids at Burford Lodge has been for the last ten years. 

 From time to time attention has been called to this giant 

 among Orchids either by travelers who have seen it in all 

 its glory in Malasia, where it is a native, or by collectors 

 who have sent home big specimens of it in the hope that 

 its magnificence might be seen here. But, although it has, 

 as a rule, grown freely, it has failed to flower, except in 

 rare instances. The Burford Lodge plant has been in the 

 collection at least ten years, and has only flowered now, 

 and that, too, after a course of treatment which, from its 

 effects on the stems and leaves, might be termed drastic, 

 but in that it has brought about the desired result it has 

 proved to be so far correct. The Kew specimen of this 

 Grammatophyllum is about four times as large as that at 

 Burford Lodge, and it is in the best of health, some of the 

 pseudo-bulbs being ten feet long, as thick as a man's wrist 

 and clothed with leaves from base to tip, but it has not 

 yet flowered. The spike produced by Sir Trevor Lawrence's 

 plant was seven feet high, as thick as a man's thumb, and 

 it bore thirty expanded flowers of a yellow and purple- 

 brown color, each five inches across ; the pedicels were 

 four inches long, rigid and of a whitish green color. There 

 were about thirty unexpanded buds at the apex of the 

 spike. A peculiar character in this and several other 

 genera is the production of two or three abnormal (male) 

 flowers at the base of the scape, in which the segments are 

 reduced to four and the lip is suppressed. 



Large, however, as is the specimen of this Orchid to be 

 seen at Kew, it is a mere pigmy when compared with the 

 dimensions given of examples seen wild and in gardens in 

 the tropics. For instance, in 1892 Mr. James Yeitch saw in 

 the Botanic Gardens at Penang a single specimen which 

 measured forty-two feet in circumference and bore thirty 

 spikes of flowers. In the following year, according to Mr, 

 Curtis, the Superintendent of the Penang gardens, the same 

 plant produced twenty-four spikes, each seven feet or more 

 long, and bearing fully one thousand expanded flowers. 

 It was, he says, growing on a mound three to four feet 

 high, where it got the full sun all day after about nine in 

 the morning. Once or twice a year half a cart-load of 

 leaf-mold was scattered among the roots, and this was the 

 only attention it received. The finest plants found grow- 

 ing wild in Penang are usually high up in the forks of 

 large trees, where they get abundance of sunlight. The 

 Kew plant was imported from Penang in 1893 by Messrs. 

 F. Sander & Co., who intended it for the Chicago Exhibi- 

 tion, but it got too much damaged in transit to be worth 

 sending. 



The history of this Orchid is given as follows in Veitch's 

 Manual 0/ Orchidaceous Flints : "This gigantic Orchid 

 excited the wonder of travelers in Malasia long before it 

 found its way into British gardens. The physician Rum- 

 phius was probably the first European scientist who became 

 acquainted with it, and through him, or through Osbeck, 

 who visited the Malay Archipelago about the middle of 

 the last century, it became known to Linnaeus and to his 

 successor, Oloff Swartz. Many years afterward it was 

 detected by Finlayson in Cochin-China, and by the French 

 botanist Gaudichaud in the Moluccas. . . . But it was not 



till Blume published a colored plate of it in Rumphia, 

 nearly a quarter of a century later, that the true character 

 of the plant became known, and the surprise of botanists 

 and the longing of horticulturists were awakened. It was 

 first flowered imperfectly by Loddiges in the Hackney 

 nursery in 1852 ; again in 1859 in a private collection in 

 Surrey, and from this the fine picture published in The 

 Botanical Magazine, t. 5157, was made. This plant had 

 stems from nine to ten feet long and a scape six feet high 

 with flowers nearly six inches across and of a rich yellow 

 color, heavily blotched and spotted with red-purple. A 

 plant flowered some years later in the collection of Sir G. 

 Staunton at Leigh Park, from which a fine drawing was 

 prepared by Fitch and published in 1876 in The Gardeners' 

 Chronicle, and this drawing is repeated in this week's issue, 

 together with drawings of the abnormal or male flowers 

 prepared fiom Sir Trevor Lawrence's plant. 



From my knowledge of this Orchid I should say that in 

 the United States, where sunshine is more abundant and 

 intense, the flowering of it would be easy of accomplish- 

 ment. It likes plenty of moisture, both at the root and 

 overhead, and it soon fills a bed of fibrous peat with a door- 

 mat-like mass of roots. It is in every sense a grand plant 

 for a large tropical stove. 



Marliac's Nymph2eas. — The best of the hybrid and seedling 

 Nymphaeas raised by the French nurseryman, Monsieur 

 Latour-Marliac, are of quite sensational beauty and interest. 

 There is a collection of them at Kew, comprising all the best 

 of those so far distributed by the raiser, and they have won 

 universal admiration even from cultivators well acquainted 

 with the older Nymphaeas. The new sorts are just the 

 plants for small aquaria, or even for cultivation in casks, as 

 they do not grow rampantly as do those of N. alba, N. 

 tuberosa and others of that ilk, but from a usually solitary 

 crown spring a loose rosette of leaves and set in the midst 

 of them, jewel-like, one, two, three, or even six flowers of 

 varying size and shade, according to age, but all beautiful, 

 richly so, in color as in form. They are expensive, it is 

 true, as Nymphaea prices go, but they are worth all 

 they cost. 



Ficus radicans variegata. — This is a pretty little creeper 

 which has been introduced by Mr. W. Bull, of Kings Road, 

 Chelsea, who exhibited plants of it at the Temple Show 

 last May, and again at the last meeting of the Royal Hor- 

 ticultural Society, by whom it was awarded a first-class 

 certificate. It grows as freely and is as clean-looking as 

 the type, while in the cream-white variegation of the leaves, 

 which are oftener more white than green, we have a char- 

 acter that is likely to make the plant exceptionally valuable 

 for clothing walls, pillars, rockeries, etc., in warm houses. 

 According to the most recent monograph of the genus Ficus, 

 F. radicans is a native of India and Malaya and its correct 

 name is F. rostrata. rrr _, 



London. W. WalSOIl. 



New or Little-known Plants. 

 Hydrangea paniculata. 



UNDER the general name of Hydrangea paniculata 

 there are four distinct plants in our gardens : 



(1) A plant known as Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora, 

 with enormous panicles of sterile flowers which open late 

 in August or early in September, and now one of the most 

 commonly cultivated shrubs in the northern and middle 

 states. 



(2) A plant which appears to be the wild form of the last 

 with much smaller panicles appearing at the same time, 

 only a few sterile flowers being scattered among the fertile 

 flowers. 



(3) A plant intermediate between these two and flower- 

 ing at the same time, the panicle being nearly as large as 

 that of No. 1, and more showy than that of No. 2 by the 

 presence of a larger number of larger sterile flowers. This 

 as a garden plant is, perhaps, the most desirable of the 

 whole group. 



