EPIDENDRUM WALLISII. 
[PuatEe 74.] 
Native of New Grenada. 
Epiphytal. Stems erect, three to four feet high, reed-like, as thick as a raven’s 
quill, leafy throughout, the sheaths, which nearly cover the spaces between the leaves, 
rugose and spotted with brownish-purple. Leaves distichous, oblong-lanceolate, acute, 
about five inches long, and an inch or rather more in breadth. Inflorescence racemose, 
the racemes many-flowered, with sheathing scales at the base, and furnished above 
with triangular-ovate bracts much shorter, than the pedicels; the racemes are both 
terminal and lateral on the stems, the lateral ones being placed opposite the leaves. 
Flowers numerous and showy, fully an inch and a half across, picturesquely coloured, 
t, with a pleasant smell of honey and musk; sepals and petals ligulate- 
oblong, acute, deep golden yellow, marked with rather small distant deep carmine- 
crimson spots; lp cuneately-flabellate, an inch broad, quadrifid, with a broad sinus 
in front, and smaller lateral ones, white, radiately pencilled with feathery lines of 
magenta-purple, which are minutely tuberculated, the disk yellow, bearing three or five 
short crests. Column adnate, the anther-bed with a quadrifid limb. 
; Ketpmxpnvi Watuisu, Reichenbach fiu.,-in Gardeners’ Chronicle, N.s., iv., 66; 
IX, 462, | 
+¥ 
We have here one of the comparatively few ornamental species of Epidendrum, 
but this, as has been truly remarked, is a real beauty—interesting, moreover, as 
Presenting a peculiar type of the genus, that has no _ pseudobulbs, but tall 
distichously ‘leafy stems, that bear both lateral and terminal racemes of flowers at 
_ Sane time and on the same stems. FE. Wallisii appears to vary somewhat in 
ts flowers; one of those bloomed by the Messrs. Veitch and Sons being recorded 
48 producing flowers with unspotted yellow sepals and petals, and a lip with three 
*range-coloured keels, and dark purple veins with small spots and lines on a white 
ground. 
This wonderful plant, which was first described in 1875 by Professor Reichenbach, 
Peculiar in having its racemes of flowers both terminal and lateral, on which 
ee we Will at once be seen it is of a very floriferous habit. Our plate was 
age from a plant in the grand collection belonging to Sir Trevor Lawrence, 
‘in " Burford Lodge, Dorking, where, under the care of Mr. Spyers, it — 
in sie grown remarkably well. We were, indeed, much surprised to find that it 
ae “tained to such large dimensions. The first plants that flowered in this country 
‘ — ae more than from fifteen to eighteen inches high; and, according to 
or Wallis’s dried Specimens, the plant in its native habitat is even dwarfer. Now 
is 
