ORCHID CULTURE PAST AND PRESENT. 117 



was also cultivated at the same time by Messrs. Greenwood and 

 Wyke, nurserymen, at Kensington, who, instead of plunging the 

 pot into the tan, placed it on the floor of the stove : it then 

 flowered. From other notes we gather that the usual treatment 

 of Orchids at this period was to pot them in a mixture of loam 

 and peat, and keep them constantly plunged in the tan bed of 

 the stove. That they should soon succumb to such treatment 

 seems to us but a very natural consequence ; nevertheless, it 

 seems to have been generally persisted in for many years. 



The first fifteen years of the present century were over- 

 shadowed by the Napoleonic wars, which retarded every art that 

 can only flourish in times of peace. Nevertheless, in the very 

 throes of that tremendous struggle, the Horticultural Society of 

 London was founded, and obtained its charter of incorporation 

 in 1809. From that time horticulture may be said to have 

 entered into public life, and to have received an impetus it never 

 could have had from the isolated efforts of private individuals. 

 Orchids, till then regarded more as curiosities than as subjects 

 to be seriously taken in hand culturally, began to come more to 

 the front, for the Messrs. Loddiges began to cultivate them for 

 sale in their Hackney nursery about the year 1812 ; and about 

 that time too, or a little later, Dr. Roxburgh sent from India the 

 first Vanda, the first Aerides, and the first Dendrobium that 

 were seen alive in England. In the same year too, Messrs. 

 Loddiges received a plant of Oncidium bifolium from a gentleman 

 who brought it from Monte Video, and who informed them that 

 *' it was hung up in the cabin without earth, and continued to 

 flower during a great part of the voyage home ;" a statement 

 that was then regarded as a traveller's tale and beyond the limits 

 of credulity. 



The " air plants," as the Vandas, Aerides, and Saccolabiums 

 were then called, were a puzzle to the horticulturists of that 

 time, and how profound was the prevailing ignorance of their 

 true character may be judged from the following extract from 

 the Botanical Begister for 1817, under tab. 220, Aerides 

 (Sarcanthus) paniculatum : — " Air plants possess the faculty of 

 growing when suspended so as to be cut off from all sustenance 

 but that derived immediately from the atmosphere. Plants of 

 other genera of this tribe, and even of a different tribe, are 

 endowed with a like faculty; in none, however, can such insula- 



