SKETCHES OF WILD ORCHIDS IN GUIANA. 



17 



Bodriguczia are not more popular with gardeners in England. 

 But the plant in its native home is a very variable one, and, 

 though very common indeed, generally occurs in a puny form 

 with pale, washed-out pink flowers ; and it is probably these 

 poor forms which have generally been imported and have got 

 the plant a bad name. 



In similar places, but very much more rarely, is another 

 Bodriguczia, once called Burling tonia (B. Candida), with much 

 broader, darker green leaves, and with huge white flowers of 

 most exquisite texture, its beauty much increased by the pale 

 lemon-coloured throat of the labellum. 



A curious feature about Burling tonia in its wild state is that 

 one seldom seems to see it in the place in which it has grown. 

 It is generally seen hanging head downward from, and at some 

 distance from, a branchlet, to which, however, it is still attached 

 by the ends of its long, white, wiry roots. I suppose that its 

 more natural habitat is in the full blaze of the sun on the tops 

 of some of the more moderate-sized, thin-leaved trees, where 

 one's eye does not generally reach ; and that it is only plants 

 which have been half torn away, and so hang, that come within 

 one's ken. 



Passing out of the sunlight, through one or other of the tree 

 arches which close the two ends of this open space, one passes 

 at once into a quite different scene, and comes at once among 

 quite different Orchids. Here, in a twilight which never 

 brightens into daylight, the curiously twisted and buttressed 

 tree-trunks, seldom of any great size, rise from banks of black 

 leaf-mould over which the ground vegetation is rank yet sparse. 

 The trees, meeting over the creek, lift almost all their leaves to 

 the sunlight, while under the dense roof thus formed their own 

 trunks and branches are swathed with Mosses and Lycopodiums 

 and Pepperworts and Aroids and with curtain-like masses of 

 pendent Orchids. 



The most characteristic Orchid of the pendent habit just 

 alluded to is a caulescent Maxillaria, which occurs in two 

 closely allied but easily distinguishable forms. In both, the 

 long and wiry rhizomes and much-sheathed pseudo-bulbs carry 

 long grassy leaves and shortly stalked white or whitish flowers, 

 individually beautiful and still more beautiful in the mass, 

 which, by a not inapt comparison, are sometimes familiarly 



