Like Mr. Chamberlain, I too am an orchid-grower. I own three acres (without a cow) on a heather-clad hilltop, and no small proportion of that landed estate is “down under orchids.” Not that I mean to say the species I cultivate, or rather allow to grow wild, on my wild little plot would excite the envy of the magnate of Highbury. They are nothing more than common English spotted orchids, springing free and spontaneous among the gorse and heather. But, oh! how beautiful they are! how much more beautiful than the dendrobiums and cattleyas, the flowering spiders and blossoming lizards of the rich man’s hothouse! How proudly they raise their tall spikes of pale bloom, true sultanas of the moorland! how daintily they woo the big burly bumble bees! how gracefully they bend their nodding heads before the bold south-west that careers across the country! They seem to me always such great regal flowers, yet simple with the simplicity of the untrodden upland.

Take a spike and look at it close; or, better still, grub it up by the roots with the point of your umbrella, and examine it all through from its foundation upward. It springs from two tubers, not unlike a pair of new potatoes to look at, but deeply divided below into finger-like processes. Those divisions it was that gave the plant its quaint old English title of “dead men’s fingers”—for, indeed, there is something clammy and corpse-like about the feel of the tubers; while that “coarser name” to which Shakespeare alludes in passing, is due to their general shape, and is still enshrined in the Greek word “orchid” which everybody now applies to them without thinking for a moment of its unsavoury meaning. But the two tubers are not of the same age. One is old and wilted; the other is young and fresh, and, as the advertisements say, “still growing.” The first is last year’s reserve-fund for this year’s flowering stem; the second is this year’s storehouse of food for next year’s blossom. Thus each season depends for its flowers upon the previous year’s income; the leaves, which are the mouths and stomachs of the plants, lay by material in due season; and the spike of bells proceeds from the tubers or consolidated reserve-fund as soon as the summer is sufficiently advanced for the process of flowering. Few plants with handsome heads or trusses of bloom, indeed, can afford to produce them upon the current season’s income; therefore you will find that most large-flowered forms, like lilies, tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils, if they wish to blossom early in the year, depend for their food-supply upon a bulb or tuber of last season’s making. Only in the orchids, however, do you find this curious device of a pair of tubers at once side by side, one being filled and fed, while the other is being slowly devoured and depleted. By the end of the season the new tuber is rich and full to bursting, while the old one is withered, flaccid, and empty.

From the tuber, in early spring, start the pretty lance-shaped leaves—green, dappled with leopard spots of some deep brown pigment. The use and meaning of these beautiful spots on the glossy green foliage no one has yet deciphered; it remains as one of the ten thousand insoluble mysteries of plant existence. That is always so in life. We tell what we know; but what we know not, who shall count it or number it? Yet the flowers, after all, are the true centre of interest in the English orchid. Thirty of them in a spike, pale lilac or white, all starred and brocaded with strange flecks of purple, they rank among the most marvellous of our native flowers in shape and structure. The long spur at the back is the factory and reservoir for the abundant honey. The face of the blossom consists of a broad and showy lip, the flaunting advertisement to bee or butterfly of the sweets within; it is flanked by two slender spreading wings, above which a third sepal arches over the helmet-like petals. Beneath this hood, or dome, in the centre of the column, the club-shaped pollen-masses lie half concealed in two pockets, or pouches—dainty littl............