May, 1916.] THE ORCHID REVIEW. 129 
of these quaint flowers, which year by year puzzle and delight me. Which 
are species, which varieties, why do they appear in quantity for one, two, 
or three years, perhaps, and then disappear suddenly ? either to turn up 
some hundreds of feet away, or to remain dormant for years, and then 
appear again in quantity. Scarcely ever do I find a fat, full capsule of seed, 
yet evidently they do propagate themselves far more successfully than I 
can understand. The spring before the war I found a nice group of a very 
pretty Ophrys, more like the bee Orchis than anything else, but pinker 
and creamier in the sepals, and lighter in the lip than that well-known 
species, which does not flower here till the month of May, while this 
flowered in March. This year I went to look for my friend towards the 
end of March, and could only find a miserable remnant of one or two spikes, 
and supposed that either it was over or that it had not reappeared. Then 
came a week of deluging rain when nobody passed that way. On the first 
fine day, however, I took some quick-eyed friends down to see what had 
happened, and on a plateau some distance off—say, ten yards or twelve 
yards—one of my friends exclaimed: ‘I never saw such quantities 
of Bee Orchids in all my life!’ and there I found in quantities this creamy 
white and pink sepalled Ophrys, with the velvety bee-like lip, but red 
rather than brown in colour. Ophrys Arachnites, with its green sepals 
and petals and black-brown lip was there also in plenty, but this was in 
groups of six and ten, enough to make patches of colour. In sixteen years 
I have never once seen it before, and yet this year it is abundant. It can 
hardly be a hybrid, as no bee Orchis will be out for some weeks; and yet it 
seems to be too distinct to be a variety of Arachnites, which is much taller 
and more vigorous; so I hope someone may give’me a clue.” 
We should much like to be favoured with specimens, for we suspect 
some mistake in the last-mentioned name, O. Arachnites being one of the 
purple-flowered species. The remarks apparently refer to O. aranifera, 
which Mr. Woodall correctly described in an interesting note at pp. 263, 
264 of our seventeenth volume. R.A.R. 
MAXILLARIA PICTA TWIN-FLOWERED.—A twin-flowered scape of Maxillaria 
picta has appeared in the Kew collection, a thing we do not remember to 
have noticed before; at all eveents the scapes are very persistently one- 
flowered in this genus. Occasional instances have been recorded in the 
genus Lycaste, while among normally single-flowered Cypripediums twin 
scapes are common, and our pages have contained figures of three-flowered 
scapes of C. Cymatodes (viii. p. 184) and C. Boltonii (xxi. p. 345). Similar 
cases are generally regarded as evidence of good culture. Maxillaria picta 
is a very interesting old garden plant, a native of Brazil, whose history was 
given at page 347 of our last volume.—R.A.R. 
