IS 72. ] 
HARDY TERRESTRIAL ORCHIDS. 
127 
of the future; and our successors will greatly marvel at our consummate folly in 
going on for so many years in a game of blind chance, in which we were 
sure to be worsted, with our capricious, harsh, inexorable climate.—D. T. Fish, 
HardwicJce. 
HARDY TERRESTRIAL ORCHIDS. 
|ARDY Orchids of the terrestrial type have generally had the credit of 
being difficult to keep and difficult to cultivate. Whatever the obstacles 
to success may be, those who have seen the fine groups of these plants 
exhibited during the last two or three years at the spring metropolitan 
shows, by Mr. Needle, gardener to H.R.H. the Comte de Paris, at York House, 
Twickenham, will readily admit that he lias at least most successfully grappled 
with and overcome them ; and to a communication made through him to the 
Gardeners’ Chronicle , whence we have borrowed the annexed woodcut of one of 
Mr. Needle’s specimens —Ophrys tenthredinifera —we are indebted for the following 
information as to his method of treatment:— 
The Comte de Paris is, it appears, a great admirer and ardent collector of 
these little gems, and is well acquainted with their native habitats on the Surrey 
Hills, and in the South of France, in Italy, and in Spain, from all which places 
the collection at York House has been enriched; and his worthy and intelligent 
gardener, Mr. Needle, cultivates the plants with great success. Experience has 
taught him that in order to get together a stock of any particular sort, the tubers 
must be collected. The tubers are both developed and matured the season before 
they flower. Thus the plants may be had in flower every spring, a fresh tuber 
being formed the summer before, while the old one having played its part—that is, 
flowered—decomposes in much the same way as a Potato u set.” Whoever 
intends growing these plants should remember that their greatest enemies are 
heat and water, either of which applied in excess is fatal to their well-doing. 
Moreover, they will not stand forcing or retarding, but must be allowed to flower 
in their own due season. The plants which flowered early in the spring, and 
which about the beginning of May were going to rest, will be kept in an open 
frame facing the south, water being gradually withheld until they are matured. 
This mode of treatment is followed only in the case of those which have 
round tubers, as the Ophrys , which may dried off; while the fusiform-rooted 
species must always be kept moist—not necessarily wet. When the plants are 
sufficiently dried off, which is readily to be seen by the decaying foliage, they 
must be removed to a cool shady frame under a north wall, where no sun can 
reach them, where they may remain dry and at rest until they show signs of 
starting into growth again in the autumn. They should then be turned out, and 
be fresh potted in good turfy loam, mixed with a little leaf-mould and sand or 
road-scrapings. The pots must be thoroughly drained, and the soil be of an open, 
porous nature, or success will not follow. These conditions are so important in 
themselves, that it does not seem to matter much what the compost is, so long as 
