_Dendrobium Ainsworthii roseum_ requires treatment similar to that given to _D. nobile_. We have found it to do well in a compost of peat and sphagnum moss, planted in pans suspended from the roof of the East India house, in a position where it can get plenty of light and air. During the growing season this plant enjoys a liberal supply of water, which after the bulbs have completed their development may be gradually withheld, and the plant cooled down by placing it in the Cattleya-house, where it should remain until the time of flowering, which extends from February to June. Mr. Stevens, of Trentham, grows it very successfully, suspended in a well-appointed plant stove, where it has abundance of light.
We remember seeing a splendid plant of _Dendrobium Ainsworthii roseum_ exhibited by Mr. Mitchell, at the Whitsuntide Manchester Show, in May, 1877, in the form of a well furnished specimen two and a half feet in height and two feet in breadth, the stems being literally smothered with some hundreds of its beautiful crimson-lipped rosy-tinted flowers.
Referring to this same Manchester Show of 1877, Mr. Anderson, of Meadow Bank, a well-known Orchid grower, writes of this plant, as follows (_Gardeners’ Chronicle_, N.S. vii., 750):—“Possibly the gem of the Exhibition was _Dendrobium Ainsworthii roseum_. This is a most remarkable seedling partaking of the character of both its parents (_D. nobile_ and _D. heterocarpum_), and in some respects superior to either. In point of floriferousness none of its parents can lay claim to such a quantity of nodes on the deciduous stems, each bearing, or rather emitting, its quota of flowers. I counted on one stem sixteen short racemes, each two and three-flowered. The flower itself has the sepals and petals of _moniliforme_ rather than of _nobile_, white shaded with an almost imperceptible tint of rose, and tipped distinctly with that soft pleasing colour. The labellum is flat, like an expanded _heterocarpum_, reflexing a little towards the centre, with a blotch covering three-quarters of its surface with deep veined purplish or rather mulberry-crimson, edged very distinctly with white, and the extremity slightly tipped with crimson. This I look upon as one of the greatest gains in hybridization, whether we regard the colour of the flower, or the general floriferousness of the plant, or its free although not awkward habit of growth. As an Orchid enthusiast of the last five and twenty years, I would pronounce it one of the greatest gains that may be counted up in the whole known Orchid family.”