Then, in 1836, the third large-flowered Cattleya species was discovered, this time in Venezuela, by George Green of Liverpool. It had taken 18 years after the appearance of C. labiata to find it. In 1836, William Jackson Hooker, a university professor in Glasgow received some Cattleya flowers from a friend of Green’s, a Mrs. Moss of Otterpool near Liverpool. Mrs. Moss also sent a folio sketch of the plant that she drew herself. The flowers of the new species were unusually large, measuring 81/2 inches (22 cm) across, and they made the flowers of Lindley’s C. labiata look small by comparison.

Hooker published a description of Cattleya mossiae in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (65: 3669) dedicating the plant to Mrs. Moss for all her efforts. He said C. mossiae was different from C. labiata because of the multiple leads produced by the plant, the large size of the flowers, their broader sepals and petals, and the color markings of their lip. What Hooker overlooked in his description was that C. mossiae flowered in the spring, while C. labiata flowered in the autumn. This wide difference in flowering season was far more important to establishing C. mossiae as a new species than the size of the flowers, their petal width, branching rhizomes and lip pattern. The picture Hooker published with his description depicts a classic C. mossiae with petals that fall forward and a deeply splashed lip pattern. But, C. mossiae also has clones with petals that stand upright like C. labiata and have a solid labiata-colored lip, so Hooker failed to make a case that his C. mossiae was really a different species from C. labiata. He lacked the important dynamic or living elements in his description, like flowering season, that would have done this. Hooker’s description of C. mossiae as a new species, however, was a landmark in the botany of the large-flowered Cattleya species because it established a precedent for all the species that came after it. Cat-tleya mossiae enabled botanists to claim species status for plants that were so similar that the old rules of botany were inadequate to describe them. Hooker’s C. mossiae said loud and clear that not every large-flowered lavender Cattleya discovered in the jungles of South America was a variety of C. labiata.

When grown in temperate climates like Europe and the United States, of course, C. mossiae has other dynamic chracteristics that are not like C. labiata. After completing its growth, C. labiata rests less than a month before sending up flower buds. Cattleya mossiae, in comparison, rests almost six months before forming buds. Cat-tleya mossiae’s fragrance also differs from C. labiata’s — a fundamental characteristic in separating species because it suggests a different pollinating insect. Cattleya mossiae has a strong, flowery fragrance, while that of C. labiata is more delicate and muted.

After C. mossiae, the discovery of the large-flowered Cattleya species was something of a circus ride. The collector Josef von Warscewicz was able to find almost any orchid in the jungle, but he seemed unable to get them back to civilization. In 1848, he found his own namesake, Cattleya warscewiczii in Medellín, Colombia, but managed to lose all the plants. Only the dried specimens reached his friend, a young German botanist named Heinrich Reichenbach. When Warscewicz discovered Cattleya dowiana in Costa Rica in 1850 he lost both the plants and the dried specimens. People doubted his glowing description of the species until it was rediscovered 15 years later in 1865 by Arce. James Bateman, who described C. dowiana in 1866, actually said he could not really swear it was a new species — so much for intestinal fortitude and botanical conviction. Then there was Cattleya trianaei, which turned up in 1850. Cattleya trianaei was imported and sold in large quantities by 1855 by Jean Jules Linden’s Belgian firm, L’Horticulture Internationale. Linden gave it the name C. trianaei so he could sell it, but it took him until 1860 to convince his friend Reichenbach to describe it as a new species.

During these years, botanists were so busy telling each other what was not a large-flowered Cattleya species that they were often unable to determine what was. Uninhibited by academic thinking, horticulturists developed a good system to separate the species based on the plant’s live growing and flowering habits, but they made the mistake of leaving botanical classification to the botanists. As a result, the species continued to change in rank, drifting from variety to species to subvariety for most of the 19th century. John Lindley established the genus Cattleya with C. labiata, then, after describing C. maxima, refused to add any more large-flowered species to the genus from then on until his death in 1865. Heinrich Reichenbach realized the importance of what he called “organic differences” (flowering season, growth and flowering cycles and fragrance) between the species, but was too intimidated by Lindley’s legacy to push the idea. In a final act of contempt for his critics, Reichenbach placed his entire orchid herbarium off limits to botanists for 25 years after his death, so a new generation of botanists could take an objective look at things.

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