Near the Palm House stands the Tropical Lily House, where now the Victoria Regia should open in July its huge white flowers tinged with royal red. This queen of water-lilies, that first flowered in Britain at Chatsworth, has to content itself here with a tank, as an exiled sovereign may have to come down to hotel lodgings; but in its native Guiana, it blocks up canals and spangles lake swamps opening in the flowery woods. The leaves are often as broad as a man’s height, with upturned rims, so that Indian women can cradle their children upon them safely while the mother does her washing in the river fringed with such weeds of truly “glorious feature.” In the same conservatory, among other water-plants, are the papyrus reeds among which Moses was set floating, in our day crowded out of fertile Egypt, but they are found growing lustily so near as Sicily; while their old economic importance, that naturalised the name in our language, has dwindled now that we can turn wood-pulp into cheap paper. I lately found the Victoria Regia enthroned in this, its original nursery; but a guide-book locates it in what, I understand, was its quarters for a time, the group of hot-houses numbered from seven to thirteen, which stand not far from the Cumberland Gate entrance. They have a show of other aquatic plants, and freaks of Nature like the pitcher-plants and living fly-traps, able to feed themselves on insects lured to their intoxicating cups that act upon the drugged victim like the digestive organs of an animal. Here are billeted the delicate orchids, living on moist warm air, which in our day have been brought to flower in succession all through the year, even by electric light under the smoky glass of Birmingham, sought out for our hothouses so diligently that in their tropical wilds some of the richest sorts begin to grow rare, while of a thousand specimens gained perhaps at the cost of felling as many trunks, but a few may survive the trying journey, at the end of which is worth more than its weight in gold what ran wild as a parasite weed in the tree-tops of the Magdalena or the Orinoco. This group of hot-houses cools off into a conservatory of South African plants, containing potted heaths such as bloom over vast stretches of Karroo, along with specimens of the curious Japanese art of dwarfing trees. For a contrast to these nurseries of tender exotics, one might turn to the Rock Garden beside them, towards the Cumberland Gate, where Alpine and other hardy growths thrive in a hollow set with rockery supplied by the destruction of one or more of those fanciful structures of the Georgian age that still dot the grounds here and there--Temple of Æolus, Temple of the Sun, and so forth. Beyond the Rock Garden lies the Herbaceous Ground’s gathering of homely plants; and at its entrance, overshadowed by Museum II., a little Alpine House accommodates Nature’s hardy dwarfs, needing no such costly shelter as her tropical Brobdignagians.