Powells’ Horticultural Garden 
ORCH I DS ON LY 
Balboa, Canal Zone, Panama 
105 
BA LBOA, C. Z., 
PA NAMA 
-June 15th, 1922 
My dear Dr Ames: 
I have your much esteemed letter of Mage June €th 
and I note the sending of the Ridgeway color standard, which has 
not yet arrived, hut will do "by next mail as package mail does not 
get here as promptly as letter. Will you accept my very many thanks 
for it. I do not know it, hut I feel sure that it,will solve many 
of my douhts. 
I also note the prospect of your sending me your 
microscope with c mara lucida attachment. How can I thank you for 
this. It is heyond me. I will learn its use,and you can he sure 
that it will yield you meny a picture from living objects, which 
I feel sure are far and away preferable to pictures from dried 
materials. My idea is to confine myself to living flowers. 
I wish I could send you the lot of specimens Inow 
have mounted before you leave for Europe- some of them are very 
beautiful, and practically all novelties. 
How long'do,.expect to be away ?, I will have for 
you quite a large lot of them awaiting you on your return. 
If you will remember that I wrote you on my re¬ 
turn from Chiriqui that I procured twp varieties of Pleurothalis 
which were smaller thaiL P. panamensis, One of th m is now about 
to flower out, one flower showing today . It is the prettiest- 
little thing I ever saw. Sepals transparent white, petals red, 
lip the most brilliant scarlet. It looks like a drop of blood had 
fallen in the center of the flower. More than one flower will, show 
on a stem, cant say now how- many. 
1.Radlkoferianu&.have not yet had time to look up the Epid volutum 
lindl, but will do so, and I will probably call Dr S attention to 
it. He wrote me that it was one of the specimens from the Moritz 
Wagner herbarium, presented to him by Prof Radlkofer, and was so 
named in his honor. It seems to me^to be distinctive enough not 
to be confused with something else, -or to be remembered. Hence I 
think that Dr S must have either overlooked E volutum / or that he 
had failed to have knowledge of it. 
The weather here is very trying in the making of 
specimens. Sometimes we have for a week or more a spell of stamp 
rainey weather, with a warm, damp, sticky atmosphere. This gets 
into everything, and moulds overnight a specimen. I have lost in 
the past a great many. I now dry out every specimen over the stove 
before going to bed- I dont mean heating it, but drying-out the 
days accumulation of moisture. Such we have had for the past 10 
days and it has kept me busy. If it lasts long enough,it even 
gets into the perf r ctly dry specimens. So I take no chances,but 
overhaul my herbarium whenever such a spell comes along. 
