US JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



tion be considered as the state of existence which suits them 

 best, but merely as one they are enabled to endure, as a carp 

 is known to do, that of being suspended out of water in a damp 

 cellar.* 1 



To keep alive an air plant for any length of time, and to 

 flower it, was regarded as a feat of extraordinary interest. The 

 first who seems to have accomplished it was Mr. Fairbaim, the 

 gardener at Claremont, who flowered Aerides odoratum in 1813. 

 How he succeeded may be related in his own words: "I put 

 the plant when first received into a basket with old tan and 

 moss, and hung it up in the pine house, where it was exposed to 

 the summer sun and to the fire heat in winter. A tub of water 

 was placed near it. so that I could plunge the basket six or seven 

 times a day, or as often as I passed it." Some years later the 

 same excellent gardener flowered Eenanthera coccinea for the 

 first time in this country. 



Towards the end of the second decade of this century, Sir 

 Joseph Banks had devised one of the most successful modes of 

 treating epiphytal Orchids then known, and which he practised 

 in his hot-house at Isleworth : 11 He placed the plants sepa- 

 rately in light cylindrical wicker baskets or cages of suitable 

 width, of which the framework was of long slender twigs wattled 

 together at the bottom, the upper portion being left open that 

 the plant might extend its growth in any direction and yet be 

 kept steady in its station, the ends of the twigs having been tied 

 together by the twine that suspends the whole to the wood-work 

 of the stove. A thin layer of vegetable mould was strewed 

 on the floor of the basket on which the rootstock was placed, 

 and then covered slightly over with a sufficiency of moss to 

 shade it and preserve a due degree of moisture."' This was 

 the first rude forerunner of our modern Orchid basket, 

 and the first instance I find recorded of moss being used for 

 surfacing. 



Loddiges at this time made their compost of rotten wood and 

 moss, with a small quantity of sand. Their Orchid stove was 

 heated by brick flues to as high a temperature as could be 

 obtained by that means, and by a tan bed in the middle kept 

 constantly moist by watering, and from which a steamy evapora- 

 tion was rising at all times without any ventilation from without. 

 Their method was, of course, imitated by probably all cultivators. 



