A Spotted Orchis by Grant Allen

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.