294 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[ Ap-il 10, laoo 
be prevented by timely, yet gradual, and judicious disbudding and 
removing superfluous growths. 
Fruit trees both indoors and out also need thoughtful attention, 
with the object of producing healthy fruitful wood, and this 
cannot be insured if the growths are not thinly disposed. The 
remarks of Mr. H. Dunkin on this subject in another column are 
worthy of the attention of persons, and they are numerous, who 
have not had the same good training in the management of fruit 
trees that enables him to give such sensible advice. 
AN AMATEUR’S EXPERIENCE WITH ORCHIDS. 
[Read by the ReT. F. D. Homer at a meeting of the Wakefield Paxton Society.] 
It has been said that the way to learn a subject is to write 
a book about it. I do not say that the way to grow Orchids is 
to lecture upon them, but I could not venture to lecture upon them 
if I had not grown them. As mastery of the subject must precede 
the writing of the book if it is to be worth anything ; so in a 
lecture on our experiences, it needs must be that we should first 
have had experiences to speak of. In Orchid culture mine do not 
extend beyond a modest range, but through the eight years in 
which I have been able to watch and tend then very closely, I can 
see, far past all I know, how vast is the great dark land of that 
which I know not. This leads me to express the hope that you 
will suffer me to turn the lecturer’s table upon you in this way, 
that, while very glad to answer any questions I can, I may be 
allowed to ask questions in return, of Orchid growers more 
experienced than myself. 
I have some Orchids that baffle me. I daresay we all have. 
There is the Orchid of wide repute as a miffy grower with anybody, 
and yet we could not resist having an attempt at it ourselves. 
There is the Orchid, now doing well, that has refused a dozen 
offers of other situations in the very same house. Again, the 
Orchid that went on amazingly for a while, but now, under no 
change of treatment whatever, is growing “ small by degrees and 
beautifully less.” There are Orchids that have always grown most 
generously with me, such as Cattleya citrina and Dendrobium 
Falconeri, and yet they are not happy in some collections, and 
there are some which I cannot keep up for long that someone else 
can manage very well. 
If there is time, I would gladly ask about these after your 
questions have been put. Were we all strangers one to another 
such a course might seem out of order, but as being alike entitled 
to write “ M.P.” after our names, as “ Member of the Paxton,” I 
feel as if no such barrier need intervene. 
Of course we know, and the reflection is one which Orchids 
seem specially constituted to call up, that not one of them can feel 
quite at home with us. All have somewhat to bear with, on points of 
importance—seasons of shorter daylight than they ever have at 
home, and days of greater length than they ever knew before, 
perhaps seasons changed and protracted for rest and growth, and 
subtle differences in air and light. We can give them neither the 
intensity of their native sunshine, for under glass ours is not the 
same, nor the richness of their native shade, nor yet the luxurious 
downpour of their own rainy seasons. Captives in a strange land, 
some will always feel this keenly. Thus will such become our 
miffy growers, our unwilling guests, that little by little sidle 
towards the door, and silently steal away. 
In the culture of Orchids, and indeed of all my favourite florist 
flowers and other plants, I am an “ amateur ” in the simplest 
meaning of that word, which signifies “ a lover,” and also in the 
sense of being my own head gardener and foreman, and my own 
“ man under him.” However, I have as helpers, and in part as 
pupils, a “ man-and-boy ”—a combination not infrequently to be 
met with in rural homes of “the undignified clergy!” What I 
ought to apologise for calling “ the range ” of Orchid houses has 
grown from time to time as the plants increased, and somehow the 
plants have increased as the houses grew ; still, the length of them 
altogether is only 87 feet. All the warm and intermediate house 
Orchids grow in a twice-lengthened lean-to, about 40 feet long and 
10 feet wide, and 10 feet high at the back. This range runs east 
and west, and has a full and clear south aspect. The houses for 
cooler and cool Orchids are two span-roofs, each 20 feet by 12 feet, 
and 8 feet high in the middle. They run north and south, and 
catch the morning and afternoon sun, but are sheltered at mid-day 
by tall Yews, not near enough, however, to overshadow them. I 
like several smaller houses better than one large one for Orchids, 
and as these contain among them 430 varieties and 911 plants you 
will see that the plants cannot be very large specimens, nor live 
very far apart. As with the houses so with the plants ; I would 
rather have them of moderate size and fair blooming strength tharc 
in “magnificent masses.” Plants of a medium size are more 
readily looked over, and signs of mischief cannot be too easily 
detected. They are in fairer proportion to bouses such as mine. 
I can grow more varieties, and can place the plants close enough 
together to need no adventitious foliage, as of Ferns, to fill up 
blank spaces. Mine have several times been in danger of getting 
too close, but it has been for want of more room, and not thaife T 
would conceal the natural habit of an Orchid, as though there werei 
some ugliness to be hidden, in those that bloom from naked stems,, 
or have grotesque or bulky pseudo-bulbs. 
It is a conventional idea that all flowers must be accompanied' 
by leaves. How many by nature are not, and when are flowers so- 
effective and emphatic, so modest or so curious, as when seen as 
Nature has disposed them on the plant ? No foliage suits them 
like their own, and those ordained to bloom without it have no need 
of it, either for their use or beauty. All the houses are of very 
simple construction. I have never aspired to build any elaborate^ 
Orchid houses. They are plain and village made, but they suit the' 
plants well, and that is the main thing. The original house is one 
which I diverted from the former use of plants more or lessi 
tropical, that had indeed their day and mission, but were not- 
Orchids, for which I may say I have always felt affection since a- 
boy. In this old house I grew Tea, Coffee, Sugar, and Tobacco, 
Rice, Ginger, Pepper, and Chocolate, Cotton, Camphor, Egg Plants,. 
Bottle Gourds (Lagenaria), and the long streaked snakes of Tricho- 
santhes colubrina. The Sensitive Plant here was a perennial, andi’ 
ripened its seeds, each curiously hung in the fringed pod like a pic¬ 
ture in a frame. I had also a Mahogany sapling, and a few other- 
foreign but familiar woods. 
These things were of interest to many of my couirtry parish¬ 
ioners, who were amused to see groceries alive, though some were^ 
disappointed that Tea and Coffee plants did not smell of what they 
were, as garden pot herbs do, or the too familiar Onion, while the- 
“ eggs ” of the Egg Plant had neither shell nor yolk. But many 
of these plants outgrew the space I had for them ; and when B; 
transferred the old house from a cramped position at Kirkby 
Malzeard to my garden amid the sunny pasture lands and meadows ■ 
round Lowfields, the tropical flora of ihat earlier epoch passed- 
gradually away, and the age of Orchids dawned and grew. 
Respecting the construction of the Orchid houses, I particularly 
wish to mention two most simple, unaffected, and effective aids 
towards supplying those necessaries of Orchid life—a maintenance- 
of atmospheric moisture, and an active circulation of the air wherv 
it would not be safe to admit any from outside. I am not here- 
propounding any catchy conundrum, or vaunting any empirical- 
patent of my own. If the one scheme is not new to you, all L 
would do is to add my hearty testimony to the value of it ; and if 
the other is not new either, it virtually is so to me, for I only found< 
it out by accident. 
I will speak of that first which concerns the circulation of 
the air. Before the span-roofs were available I needed a smalh 
cooler compartment, which I built against part of the lean-to front, 
and connected this annexe for its supply of heat by removing the- 
glass front paitition between the lean-to and it; leaving, however,, 
the brickwork below the front sashes. A stream of warm air- 
flowed in, and under it a cold return current from the annexe set- 
in too, and as it had to pass over a stage of warm house plants I 
felt that I had perpetrated a blunder. In addition to this form of 
failure there was another. A cold and motionless body of air,, 
some 3 or 4 feet deep, lay in the annexe at the level of the return, 
current, and down to the floor. The back cool current hardly 
ruffled the surface of this heavy,'cold, dead sea of air. A lighted 
candle was a beautifully delicate test of this, but so indeed was T 
in feeling like a warm blooded animal above the waist, and a cold 
blooded one below ; much as we might suppose a mermaid would 
have to be in her fishy and fieshy combination. 
It then occurred to me to knock out every other brick in the. 
lowest three courses of the partition wall. This device of course 
drained the dead sea, and set the whole body of air in circulation ; 
nothing but warm air passed over the plants, and all the cool from 
the annexe flowed back through the brickwork channels near the 
floor, to be re-heated in the lean-to. In a short time there was not- 
any chilly sir in the whole circulation, and never has been since. 
The colder and more unsafe for admittance the outer air may be, the 
more rapidly does this new circulation move. The effect has been 
very happy upon both the growth and the foliage of the plants,, 
and the tenderest flowers do not suffer from spot and damp in the 
most sullen and obnoxious weather. I have the span-roofed houses 
so arranged that I can have a similar action at work between them. 
One is less supplied with pipes than the other, both because I 
require it cooler, and because if the heat were equal, there might be 
the calm of an equilibrium, so far as this kind of circulation is 
