Even parasites have their own parasitic growth. Parasites flourish as trees self-grafted upon trees. Draperies and tapestries and motionless cascades, this inundation of parasitic life falls back again to the ground in great growing clumps. What indeed is a parasite? Little rifts of color have collected here and there, concentrated deep in the nooks and crevices of trees, moulded into orchid form. Some are tiny as mosses and grow upon the ground, dewy-looking, little violet-colored flowers. Some lie upon the water, some droop over the edge of precipices, their great mass of fleshy, aerial roots sucking damp nourishment from the air. Certain trees seem destined by nature as orchid gardens. Numberless varieties, each with its peculiar bearing, perch upon the limbs, night-scented blossoms with a spongy texture fringed and fluted in a thousand ways; beautiful monsters of crimson and black, whose queer little phantom faces, with beards of fine hairs, make mouths at you. Hot and moist, the imperceptible odor of each mingles with the mass of other imperceptible odors, oppressive at last by sheer force of numbers. The habits of orchids, if so they may be called, are amazing; for example: their attraction of insects and means of scattering their pollen about on a moth’s body; their bright color luring day-flyers and their strong odor night-flyers to the same flower; the elastic flaps, a resource of others for a similar end. As Darwin said: “With parts capable of movement and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt really different from sensibility, they seem to us in our ignorance as if modeled by the wildest caprice.” Whimsical and wayward, restrained by no precedent, an orchid dares defiance in all the properties it possesses, odor, form, and color, so that the line of its descent is sometimes impossible to distinguish. This anarchist of flowers throws out an unexpected leaf or petal wherever it chooses, and if interfered with, refuses even to produce its own blossoms, veering off in independence. The most elegant flower that grows, able to conventionalize even nature herself by lusciously designed leaves--patterns whose suitable background would be courts of kings--riots here alone in “languid magnificence,” merely glanced at by a passing humming-bird.