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Both the species of Renanthera need great heat. Among "facts not generally known" to orchid-growers, but decidedly interesting for them, is the commercial habitat, as one may say, of R. coccinea. The books state correctly that it is a native of Cochin China. Orchids coming from such a distance must needs be withered on arrival.
Sir Trevor Lawrence observed the other day: "With regard to the longevity of orchids, I have one which I know to have been in this country for more than fifty years, probably even twenty years longer than that Renanthera coccinea." The finest specimens of Cattleya in Mr. Stevenson Clarke's houses have been "grown on" from small pieces imported twenty years ago.
In those other cases the differing forms represent male and female sex, but the microscope has not yet discovered any sort of reason for the like eccentricity of this Renanthera. Its proper inflorescence, as one may put it, is greenish yellow, blotched with brown, three inches in diameter, clothing a spike sometimes twelve feet long.
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