SKETCHES OF WILD ORCHIDS IN GUIANA. 
47 
Rodriguezia 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 
Rodriguezia , 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 Burlingtonia 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 r by a not inapt comparison, are sometimes familiarly 
