‘Your reverence and all these caballeros shall swear on the altar to give me the white Flor de San Sebastian which grows on the church roof.’
The end is foreseen. Roezl carried off his White Cattleya and sold it to Mr. George Hardy of Manchester for 280 guineas.
THE PHALAENOPSIS HOUSE
Phalaenopsis are noted for whimsicality. They flourish in holes and corners where no experienced gardener would put them, and they flatly refuse to live under all the conditions most approved by science. Most persons who grow them have such adventures to tell, their own or reported. Sir Trevor Lawrence mentioned at the Orchid Conference that he once built a Phalaenopsis house at the cost of £600; after a few months’ trial he restored his plants to their old unsatisfactory quarters and turned this beautiful building to another purpose. The authorities at Kew tell the same story with rueful merriment. In both cases, the situation, the plan, every detail, had been carefully and maturely weighed, with intimate knowledge of the eccentricities to be dealt with and profound respect for them. Upon the other hand, I could name a ‘grower’ of the highest standing who used to keep his Phalaenopsis in a ramshackle old greenhouse belonging to a rough market-gardener of the neighbourhood—perhaps does still. How he came to learn that they would thrive there as if under a blessed spell I have forgotten. But once I paid the market-gardener a visit and there, with my own eyes, beheld them flourishing under conditions such that I do not expect a plain statement of the facts to be believed. In the midst of the rusty old ruin was a stand with walls of brick; above this wires had been fixed along the roof. The big plants hung lowest. Upon the edges of their baskets smaller plants were poised, and so they stood, one above another, like a child’s house of cards—I am afraid to say how high. A labouring man stood first at one end, then at the other, and cheerfully plied the syringe. They were not taken down nor touched from month to month.
Seeing and hearing all this, I cried—but the reader can imagine what I cried.
‘Well,’ replied the market-gardener, ‘I don’t understand your orchids. But I shouldn’t ha’ thought they was looking poorly.’
Poorly! Under these remarkable circumstances some scores of Phalaenopsis were thriving as I never saw them elsewhere.
In this house they do very well, growing and flowering freely, giving no trouble by mysterious ailments. We have most of the large species—amabilis, Stuartiana, Schilleriana, Sanderiana, etc. No description of these is required. Hybrids of Phalaenopsis are few as yet. Here is Hebe, the product of rosea × Sanderiana, rosy white of sepal and petal, bright pink of lip, yellow at the base.