ORCHID CULTURE PAST AND PRESENT. 



115 



extension of fancy species, what we wanted was to raise stocks 

 of really first-class varieties. He should be very sorry if ever 

 this beautiful flower were excluded from our gardens, where it is 

 now so generally cultivated. 



Mr. Douglas added, as a proof of the hardiness of the 

 Auricula, the case of a working man who had most successfully 

 cultivated the plant and raised a most strikingly new variety in an 

 open garden in the smoky atmosphere of Sheffield. 



OKCHID CULTUEE PAST AND PEE SENT. 

 By Mr. H. J. Veitch, F.L.S., F.R.H.S. 



[Read June 11, 1889.] 



In accordance with the request of the Council that I should 

 to-day treat about Orchids, I propose to review, as concisely as 

 the subject admits, the progress of the cultivation of the Epiphytal 

 Orchids from their first introduction into British gardens up to 

 the present time. In the course of this retrospect I shall point 

 out some of the difficulties which our predecessors had to contend 

 with in this branch of horticulture, and how they succeeded, at 

 least in part, in overcoming them, and thence from their successes 

 and failures to derive, if possible, some practical hints for our 

 own guidance. 



The first tropical orchid that became established in the hot- 

 houses of Great Britain seems to have been the Vanilla, which 

 was known to Miller, the second edition of whose Dictionary of 

 Gardening was published in 1768. Miller also enumerates 

 several species of Epidendrum some of which must have been 

 known to him in a living state, for he says : " The plants cannot 

 by any art yet known be cultivated in the ground, though, could 

 they be brought to thrive, many of them produce very fine 

 flowers of uncommon form." Three species sent from America, 

 which he planted with care in pots and placed in a stove, 

 produced flowers, but the plants soon after perished. 



A few years later Dr. John Fothergill brought home from 

 China, among other plants introduced for the first time into 



