AucustT, 1906.) THE ORCHID REVIEW. 237 
THE HEAVENLIEST FLOWER. 
SEVERAL of the recent numbers of the Gardeners’ Chronicle of America 
which have reached us have not contained any information about Orchids. 
The May issue can scarcely be called an exception, but it contains the 
following article on “‘ The Heavenliest Flower,” which our readers may 
like to see :-— 
“It was always rather hard to believe that a certain Dutchman, in the time 
of the tulip craze in Holland, paid 4,203 guilders for a single commonplace 
tulip bulb that looked like an onion, and it comes much easier to under- 
stand how an Englishman should have been willing to pay 6,000 dollars— 
more than twice as much as the price of the famous tulip—for an Orchid, in 
London recently. The Orchid is a heavenly flower, and the tulip not only 
earthly, but Dutchy. The Orchid often grows in the air, and appears to 
possess almost miraculous characteristics. One of the species not only 
catches insects, but keeps its long tentacles continually in motion to get 
hold of them. The Orchids which live in the air spread their roots abroad 
to absorb the moisture of the atmosphere, and they solve the problem which 
the scientists are still vainly striving to solve, namely, of capturing nitrogen 
direct from the atmosphere. 
And their beauty! That, beyond all question, and not their wonderful 
capacity for living in the air and moving stealthily about, like a live thing, 
to catch insects, is the divinest thing about them. A show of fine Orchids 
is like a flight of beautiful birds ; the enthusiast might even compare it with 
a throng of angels. And if beautiful Orchids convey such.a suggestion in a 
floral hall or a conservatory, fancy what the effect must be as their brilliant 
and delicate flowers hang in masses in luxuriant tropical forests, where the 
palm vies with the feathery bamboo or the far-spreading banyan in 
splendour! In such a situation, amidst the splashings of some tropic 
stream, their colours, in rose, in lilac, in yellow, white, or green, prove as 
intense a delight as their violet-like odours. They are indeed a marvel, and 
if it is true that all things in nature are a symbol of the things of the spirit, 
the Orchids must symbolize the angels that were once pure and beautiful 
women. | 
This 6,000 dollar Orchid came from Burma, and was unique, of course, 
or it would not have brought so great a price. But the American child 
gathers in the woods Orchids which, in their more modest beauty, are in 
form quite as surprising as the tropical specimens, and gets them for 
nothing. Ladyslippers or moccasin flowers, the pogonia and the calopogon, 
the yellow-fringed and the purple-fringed Orchids grow hereabouts, and 
tichly reward the searcher for their delicate splendours.—Saturday Evening 
Mail.” 
