March Flowers

A little old man sat last week in the 20th annual International Flower Show at Manhattan's Grand Central Palace, quietly watching record crowds mill around the long tables of orchid exhibits. He watched the orchids, bright and delicate, crumple slowly after four days in the crowd's breath. Now & then he eyed particularly a spray of big plum-striped orchids, a hybrid whose glazed hairy petals crumpled not at all. This extraordinary flower had equal upper & lower petals unlike most orchids, and attenuated side petals that fell like walrus mustaches. It was Cyprepedium Rothschildianum, rarest orchid at the Show, and it had won the prize as the best specimen orchid plant shown by a commercial grower. The little old man was John Emil Lager, orchid-hunter, aged 72. He had grown the Rarest Orchid in his Lager & Hurrell hothouses in Summit, N. J. where grow nothing but orchids. Last week his Show entry of 133 plants, 60 varieties, won a special award as the finest commercial orchid exhibit.

Orchids grow from Alaska to Argentina in the Western Hemisphere. The best are hardest to find, in the jungled Casanare and San Martin regions of Colombia and Peru. A good man to find them was Swedish-born John Emil Lager, until the U. S. put an embargo on orchids in 1919 because they carry insects. From 1890 until 1908 he ranged South America for the wild strange blooms from which he has grown rare progeny ever since--huge single flowers for debutantes, dowagers and prima donnas; smaller ones for fancy gentlemen; orchids in long sprays, in tiny spidery spikes, some resembling pansies or dogwood blossoms, some like sweet peas, like pistachio candy. Most of John Lager's finest plants were at home last week. Too valuable to be entered in shows are the really rare orchids which orchid men guard like crown jewels.

John Lager found the world's rarest orchid in 1908. Of a batch of Cattleya Gigas he had shipped from South America, one astonishingly bloomed Albino. He sold it, the only one ever found, to Baron Firmen Lambeau of Belgium for $10,000. Lambeau managed to propagate it but it is still the world's rarest known orchid.

Rarer still but now unknown was a red Masdevallia orchid powdered with gold. Lager once found a single specimen of it growing high in a South American tree. He searched in vain for more nearby, later found some 500 mi. away. He shipped a lot to the coast where they somehow got sidetracked. In a seaport warehouse they lay until they were dead. No one has yet found any more gold-powdered red orchids like that.

Orchid Man Lager usually hunted alone with native bearers, sending his finds back to his Partner Henry Hurrell, now 78, by muleback, canoe and raft. Once a hostile Indian tribe led him into virgin orchid territory after he had cured a sick child with a dose of patent cough medicine. Another time, looking closely into a new orchid, he met the stare of a deadly little red coral snake. Once he camped on a little island in the great Orinoco River, his orchids all boxed on their rafts for the trip home. Flood, freshets boomed down the river, lifted Lager, rafts and orchids and set them on land 400 mi. downstream. Since the U. S. embargo he has stopped hunting except occasionally in Florida.

Other highlights of last week's Flower Show:

P: A yellow rose with apricot tints named Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It won a gold prize.

P: Alfred Kottmiller's tropical garden with the rare cocoloba tree (world's biggest plant leaves: 24 in. long), umbrella and palm trees, a cave and fake spider webs.

P: Mr. & Mrs. Marshall Field Ill's formal setting which won Mussolini's prize for Italianate gardens. The Show ended with the medal still "lost in the mails" somewhere between Rome, Washington and the Grand Central Palace. C. A new competition for flower shadows against screens lit from inside. C. A prize-winning plant group arranged by Mrs. Carter Leidy before her death by drowning under an automobile in the Bronx River last month (TIME, March 20).

P: As Manhattan's Show ended with March snow falling outside. First Lady Roosevelt tapped a telegraph key in Manhattan to open St. Louis's Flower Show. Said she, "I have a great love for flowers and feel that they carry a message of beauty which we can share the world over. And between those who are flower lovers --and in that we include flower growers and flower sellers--a kinship and common bond exists which should carry good-will not only from city to city and state to state but also from nation to nation."

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