S34 THE ORCHID REVIEW. [NoVEMBER, 1914. 
ey 
he 
See citie macrocarpum is one of the commonest of cultivated 
species, but very few plants of it have such an interesting history as 
one in the collection of G. Rae Fraser, Esq., Piggott’s Manor, Letchmore 
Heath. This has been recorded by Mr. Fraser in his ‘‘ Caribbean. Notes,” 
which appeared some time ago in the 4 berdeen Journal, as follows :— 
oS CATASETUM MACROCARPUM. 
‘“THE VERSATILE ORCHID.” 
‘Amongst the acquaintances I made in 1go8 at the Queen’s Park 
Hotel was Mr. De Courcy Hamilton, who had gone to Trinidad to report 
upon some Cocoa estates. In a plantation somewhere near the Pitch Lake 
he picked off a tree a monstrous Orchid bulb, with the intention of taking 
it home in the ‘‘ Orinoco,’”’ but when we neared Southampton he got tired 
of it, and declared his intention of throwing it overboard unless | would 
care to have it. I was glad to take it, being curious to know what sort of 
a flower, if any, such a monstrosity would produce. I handed it over to 
my gardener, and for two years it produced nothing but leaves. It 
bloomed first in September, 1g10, just in time to celebrate my daughter's 
wedding, but the sickly yellowish green flowers were so hideously eccentric 
that nobody would dream of using them for table decoration. I sent 4. 
specimen to the Royal Horticultural Society for identification, and they 
were so interested in it that they asked me to send the spike to the Museum 
at Kew. It proved to be the female flowers of the extraordinary Catasetum 
macrocarpum (otherwise known as C. tridentatum), which was supposed to 
produce male and neuter flowers also, differing so much from one another 
in appearance that, as Darwin points out in his work on the Fertilization of 
Orchids, the plants bearing them have been treated by botanists as three 
different species. This discovery led me to wonder whether my bulb on its 
second blooming would produce either a male or a neuter flower. It tried 
to flower in April and September, Ig1I, but on each occasion, through 
carelessness, the buds were destroyed by slugs. In September, 19! ” 
flowered successfully, and the bloom was again female. But, to my joy: ™ 
October, 1913, it produced an entirely different flower, rather attractive ” 
appearance, which I handed to Mr. Rolfe at Kew, and he identified 
as masculine. He was delighted to add it to the Museum collection, and 
expressed his intention to affix the spikes of the male and female flowers 
from my plant to the same mount. As my gardener had separated the 
original bulb into four, I gave two of these to Kew and retained the others; 
the newest of which had gone into bud just before I started for Jamaica. I 
hoped it might produce a neuter spike, but the result was only another 
