DIPODIUM PALUDOSUM. 
[Puate 422.] 
Native of Malacca, Borneo, and Cochin China. 
Epiphytal. Stem slender, erect, producing roots at intervals. Leaves distichous, 
sheathing, ligulate, acute, thin in texture, and pale green or metallic green in colour. 
Peduncle axillary, erect, much longer than the leaves, furnished with a few small 
sheathing bracts, and bearing near the apex a raceme of from six to twelve flowers, 
measuring individually about an inch and a half across. Sepals and petals sub-equal, 
oblong-lanceolate, about an inch long, somewhat fleshy in texture, all of a soft 
creamy white, dotted with purplish magenta; lip cuneate-oblong, slightly thickened 
towards the base, and there ornamented with two prominent teeth, white, streaked 
and blotched with purple, downy along the centre, dentate on the margins. 
Column stout, white, passing into pale yellow upwards. 
Dreopium paLuposum, Reichenbach fils, Xenia Orchidacea, ii., p- 15; Gardeners’ 
Chronicle, 1888, ii., p. 91. 
GRAMMATOPHYLLUM PALUDOSUM, Griffith, Notule, iii., p. 344. 
WAILESIA PALuDOSA, Reichenbach fils, Bonplandia, ii., p. 93. 
We have some little diffidence in placing this plant in the genus Dipodium 
a genus established by Robert Brown, and which we are told includes 
a few leafless terrestrial plants, as with neither of these features does the plant 
here depicted agree; it certainly accords with the genus Wailesia of Lindley, 
established upon W. picta, also a native of Malacca, and with W. paludosa, as the plant 
now before us is described by Reichenbach ; but more recent authorities have merged 
that genus with Dipodium. Be this right or wrong, however, we have to be 
satisfied with placing on record a good figure of this rare plant, and allow those 
learned in technicalities to decide the question. 
The plant, whose portrait we now lay before our readers, flowered in our own 
collection in the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries, Upper Holloway, London, in July 
of last year, and was exhibited before the Committee of the Royal Horticultural 
Society ; we believe it was the first appearance of its flowers in European 
gardens. It was originally found by Griffith in the swampy uplands of Ayer- 
Pununs, in Malacca, growing in company with two or three species of Nepenthes, 
and it was named by him Grammatophyllum paludosum. More recently it was 
imported from Borneo by Messrs. Veitch and Sons, of Chelsea; later it was found 
in Cochin China by M. Regnier, of Fontenay-sou-Bois, Paris, from whose 
importation the greater part of the plants now existing in European gardens have 
emanated. 3 
