The tillage of the farm is our business, and there are many points here which the amateur should note.  Observe the bricks beneath your feet.  They have a hollow pattern which retains the water, though your boots keep dry.  Each side of the pathway lie shallow troughs, always full.  Beneath that staging mentioned is a bed of leaves, interrupted by a tank here, by a group of ferns there, vividly green.  Slender iron pipes run through the house from end to end, so perforated that on turning a tap they soak these beds, fill the little troughs and hollow bricks, play in all directions down below, but never touch a plant.  Under such constant drenching the leaf-beds decay, throwing up those gases and vapours in which the orchid delights at home.  Thus the amateur should arrange his greenhouse, so far as he may.  But I would not have it understood that these elaborate contrivances are essential.  If you would beat Nature, as here, making invariably such bulbs and flowers as she produces only under rare conditions, you must follow this system.  But orchids are not exacting.

The house opens, at its further end, in a magnificent structure designed especially to exhibit plants of warm species in bloom.  It is three hundred feet long, twenty-six wide, eighteen high—­the piping laid end to end, would measure as nearly as possible one mile:  we see a practical illustration of the resources of the establishment, when it is expected to furnish such a show.  Here are stored the huge specimens of Cymbidium Lowianum, nine of which astounded the good people of Berlin with a display of one hundred and fifty flower spikes, all open at once.  We observe at least a score as well furnished, and hundreds which a royal gardener would survey with pride.  They rise one above another in a great bank, crowned and brightened by garlands of pale green and chocolate.  Other Cymbidiums are here, but not the beautiful C. eburneum.  Its large white flowers, erect on a short spike, not drooping like these, will be found in a cool house—­smelt with delight before they are found.

Further on we have a bank of Dendrobiums, so densely clothed in bloom that the leaves are unnoticed.  Lovely beyond all to my taste, if, indeed, one may make a comparison, is D. luteolum, with flowers of palest, tenderest primrose, rarely seen unhappily, for it will not reconcile itself to our treatment.  Then again a bank of Cattleyas, of Vandas, of miscellaneous genera.  The pathway is hedged on one side with Begonia coralina, an unimproved species too straggling of growth and too small of flower to be worth its room under ordinary conditions; but a glorious thing here, climbing to the roof, festooned at every season of the year with countless rosy sprays.

Beyond this show-house lie the small structures devoted to “hybridization,” but I deal with them in another chapter.  Here also are the Phaloenopsis, the very hot Vandas, Bolleas, Pescatoreas, Anaectochili, and such dainty but capricious beauties.