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Updated: September 11, 2025
This orchid is now very common in English hot-houses, so here is one point of contact with the tropical forest. The D. densiflorum is equally common and grows in much the same region. It flowers in a dense cluster on a stalk somewhat after the fashion of a hyacinth. The sepals and petals of this beautiful species are of a pale yellow, while the lip is of a rich orange.
The old soldiers in the institution seem to regard the tomb as an object of adoration, and guard it as carefully as they would the living body of the hero. Across the Seine from the Hotel des Invalides, on the avenue des Champs Elysees, is the fashionable Jardin d'Hiver, a roofed garden of hot-houses, and which is open in winter as a flower-garden. The admittance is not free, but costs a franc.
Touching that Crystal Palace: did you observe how little notion of size she could have got from pictures when she asked me if the Crystal Palace was much bigger than the hot-houses at Lewis Castle?" "What a world of wonder the girl is coming into!" said the other meditatively. "But it will be all lit up by one sun if only you take care of her and justify her belief in you."
I should think it impossible for the owner of this house to imbue it with his personality to such a degree as to feel it to be his home. It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too large for him. After seeing what was to be seen of the rooms, we visited the gardens, in which are noble conservatories and hot-houses, containing all manner of rare and beautiful flowers, and tropical fruits.
The plant appears to derive nutriment from the decomposition of its victims. "Plants of this kind, which have been kept in hot-houses in England, from which insects were carefully excluded, have been observed to languish, but were restored by placing little bits of meat upon their traps, the decay of these seeming to answer the same purpose."
According to the Italian observer Passerini, the Garden Scolia feeds her family on the larvae of Oryctes nasicornis, in the heaps of old tan-waste removed from the hot-houses. I do not despair of seeing this colossal Wasp coming to establish herself one day in my heaps of leaf-mould, in which the same Scarabaeid is swarming.
How great, for instance, are the alterations in the conditions of existence which tropical plants undergo in our hot-houses and gardens! And the only alteration they show is that they are stunted and only bear blossoms with difficulty and fruits with still greater difficulty.
Mavis learned how Mrs Budd's husband had been head gardener to a neighbouring baronet, until increasing infirmities had compelled him to give up work; also, that as he had spent most of his life in hot-houses, the kitchen had always to have a big fire blazing in order that the old man might have the heat necessary for his comfort.
At Mousseaux, the seals were put on the hot-houses, and all the plants nearly destroyed. Valuable remains of sculpture were condemned for a crest, a fleur de lys, or a coronet attached to them; and the deities of the Heathen mythology were made war upon by the ignorance of the republican executioners, who could not distinguish them from emblems of feodality.*
Presently they all trooped into the hot-houses warm and fragrant with the smell of freshly-watered earth, and a rather fierce-looking gardener paused in his work to exhibit this or that particular plant in which he took a special interest. But the pride of the rectory was the orchid-house, and insensibly everybody gravitated towards it.
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