Very notable is the Zygo-colax hybrid, Leopardinus (Zygopetalum maxillare × Colax jugosus), of which we give an illustration.
Here is also the Zygopetalum hybrid, Perrenoudii (intermedium × Guatieri).—Sepals and petals green, heavily blurred with brown. Lip violet, deepening to purple.
Against the back wall of this house stands a little grove of Thunias Bensoniae and Marshalliana; the former magenta and purple, and the latter white with yellow throat, profusely striped with orange red. The wondrous intricacy of design so notable in the colouring of orchids is nowhere more conspicuous than in Thunia Marshalliana.
The Cymbidium House
Our ‘specimen’ Cymbidiums, that is, the large plants, are scattered up and down in other houses; for singly they are ornaments, and together their great bulk and long leaves would occupy too much space. Here are only small examples, or small species, planted out upon a bed of tufa amidst ferns and moss and begonias, Cyrtodeira Chontalensis, and the pretty ‘African violet,’ St. Paulii ionantha.
Cymbidiums are not showy, as the term applies to Cattleyas and Dendrobes. Their colour, if not white, is brown or yellow, with red-brown markings. We hear indeed of wonders to be introduced some day—of a gigantic species, all golden, which dwells in secluded valleys of the Himalayas, and another, bright scarlet, in Madagascar. In fact, this was collected again and again by M. Humblot and shipped to Europe; but every piece died before arrival. At length M. Humblot carried some home himself, and a few survived. Sir Trevor Lawrence bought two, I believe, but they died before flowering. So did all the rest.
But if the Cymbidiums of our experience make no display of brilliant colour, assuredly they have other virtues. When eburneum thrusts up its rigid spikes, in winter or earliest spring, crowned with great ivory blooms, the air is loaded with their perfume. I have seen a plant of Lowianum with more than twenty garlands arching out from its thicket of leaves, each bearing fifteen to twenty-five three-inch flowers, yellow or greenish, with a heavy bar of copper-red across the lip. And they grow fast. It is said that at Alnwick the Duke of Northumberland has specimens of unknown age filling boxes four feet square; each must be a garden in itself when the flowers open. And they last three months when circumstances are favourable. Sometimes also—but too rarely—the greenish yellow of Lowianum is changed to bright soft green. Nobody then could say that the colouring is not attractive.
We have here most of the recognised species—Cymbidiums are not much given to ‘sporting’: Devonianum, buff, freckled with dull crimson—lip purplish, with a dark spot on either side; Sinensis, small, brown and yellow, scented; Hookeri, greenish, dotted and blotched with purple; Traceyanum, greenish, striped with red-brown, lip white, similarly dotted, and the famous Baron Schröder variety thereof, which arrived in the very first consignment, but never since; pendulum, dusky olive, lip whitish, reddish at the sides and tip; and so on.
The only hybrids of Cymbidium known to me are eburneo-Lowianum and its converse, Lowiano-eburneum. The former is creamy yellow, with the V-shaped blotch of its father on the lip; the latter pure white, with the same blotch more sharply defined—which is to say, that Lowiano-eburneum is much the better of the two. Both are represented here.
Against the glass, right and left all round, are Coelogynes of sorts.