ORCHID CULTURE PAST AND PRESENT. 



127 



cultural institution, as well as a botanical institution. It would 

 be quite impossible to refer to this subject without mentioning 

 what had been done by the author of this paper himself in this 

 branch of horticulture. We owed not a few of the most beau- 

 tiful Orchids to the skill which has been brought to bear upon 

 the subject by the firm of which Mr. Veitch was the head. A 

 gentleman present had told him that some plants of Saccolabium, 

 which he had found upon mountains in India, had had 

 hoar frost upon them, and he, the Chairman, had found them 

 growing in ravines where there must be several degrees of frost 

 and not an inconsiderable amount of snow. 



Sir Chas. Strickland agreed with the remarks which had 

 been made as to empiricism in the treatment of Orchids, but 

 thought it should be remembered that these plants cannot be 

 grown in their natural state because they cannot be grown out 

 of doors in this country. He had grown a number of Orchids, 

 and amongst them Cattleya citrina, which Mr. Veitch had 

 referred to as being hard to rear, and he had found that this and 

 other Mexican Orchids grew best in ordinary greenhouses. He 

 had grown C. citrina for fifteen or sixteen years, and the last 

 bulbs were larger than any of the others had been. They did 

 very well in an ordinary greenhouse until the latter part of the 

 summer, when they should be removed to a warm vinery. Re- 

 ferring to Laelia majalis, he said that the damp coldness of our 

 winters was very destructive to it ; what it really wanted was a 

 tropical winter, which was comparatively dry. He had once 

 left some plants out of doors longer than they should have 

 been, and they were exposed to 16 degrees of frost, which 

 injured them somewhat, but they recovered. The speaker 

 had also had Vanda caerulea in a house which was not free 

 from frost. One reason of the failure in the cultivation of 

 Orchids was the difficulty in providing in one or more houses the 

 requisite climatic conditions for so many different species. The 

 tropics of South America were different from those of Asia. In 

 many parts of the former the temperature varied very little 

 throughout the year, so that Orchids brought from tropical Asia, 

 with a very variable climate, could not be successfully grown 

 in the same house with those brought from South America. 



Mr. Thiselton Dyer said that the President had been good 

 enough to refer to what they had been trying to do at Kew. 



