On my way back from the den it was Jim Pan who pointed out to me on the lower slope of the mountain the beautiful showy orchid (Orchis spectabilis). Between two oblong shining green leaves grew a loose spike of purple-pink and white butterfly blossoms. This is the first of the orchids to appear, and no more exquisite or beautiful flower could head the procession which stretches from May until September. I find this flower but seldom, usually because I am not in the hill-country early enough, although once I found a perfect flower in bloom as late as Decoration Day, a left-over from the first spring flowers.
It was Jim, too, that day, who quite appropriately showed me the rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera pubescens), with its rosette of green leaves heavily veined with white, from the centre of which in late summer grows a spike of crowded, greenish-white flowers. Under the doctrine of signatures, these leaves are still thought by many to be a sure cure for the bite of a rattlesnake. Personally, I would rather rely on a sharp knife and permanganate of potash. In the same group as the rattlesnake plantain are several varieties of lady’s tresses, which grow in every damp meadow in midsummer and early fall. Little spikes of greenish-white flowers they are, growing out of what looks like a twisted or braided stem. Of them all the most interesting to me is the grass-leaved lady’s tresses (Gyrostachys præcox), where the flowers grow round and round the stem in a perfect spiral.
As I went on with my hunting, I learned that not all the members of the orchis family are beautiful. There is the coral root, with tiny dull brownish-purple flowers, which one finds growing in dry woods, often near colonies of the Indian pipe. The green and the ragged-fringed orchids are other disappointing members. Yet, to a confirmed collector, even these poor relations of the family are full of interest. In fact, the second rarest orchid of our American list—the celebrated crane-fly orchid (Tipularia unifolia)—has a series of insignificant greenish-purple blossoms which look as much like mosquitoes or flies as anything else, and can be detected only with the greatest difficulty. Yet I am planning to take a journey of several hundred miles this very summer on the off-chance of seeing one of these flowers. Nearly as rare is the strange ram’s-head lady’s-slipper (Cypripedium arietinum), the rarest of all the cypripedia and belonging to the same family as the glorious moccasin flower and queen flower. The lip of the ram’s-head consists of a strange greenish pouch with purple streaks, shaped like the head of a ram.
There are scores of other odd, often lovely, and usually rare, members of the great orchis family, which can be met with from May to September. There is the beautiful golden whip-poor-will’s shoe, in two sizes (Cypripedium hirsutum, and Cypripedium parviflorum), and those lovely nymphs, rose-purple Arethusa (Arethusa bulbosa), and Calypso (Calypso borealis), with her purple blossom varied with pink and shading to yellow.
One of the fascinations of orchid-hunting is the fact that you may suddenly light upon a strange orchid growing in a place which you have passed for years. Such a happening came to me the day when I first found the rose pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides). I was following a cow-path through the hard hack pastures which I had traveled perhaps a hundred times before. Suddenly, as I came to the slope of the upper pasture, growing in the wet bank of the deep-cut trail, my eye caught sight of a little flower of the purest rose-pink, the color of the peach-blossom, with a deeply fringed drooping lip, the whole flower springing from a slender stem with oval, grass-like leaves. To me it had a fragrance like almonds, although others have found in it the scent of sweet violets or of fresh raspberries. It is the pogonia family which includes the rarest of all of our orchids, the almost unknown smaller whorled pogonia (Pogonia affinis). Few indeed have been the botanists who have seen even a pressed specimen of this strange flower.
Two weeks after I found the rose pogonia, I came again to visit her. To my astonishment and delight, by her side was growing another orchid, like some purple-pink butterfly which had alighted on a long swaying stem. It was no other than the beautiful grass-pink (Limodorum tuberosum), which blooms in July, while the pogonia comes out in late June. The grass-pink has from two to six blossoms on each stem, and the yellow lip is above instead of below the flower, as in the case of most orchids. Years later I was to find this orchid growing by scores in the pine-barrens.
Last, but by no means least, is the great genus Habenaria—the exquisite fringed orchids. Purple, white, gold, green—they wear all these colors. He who has never seen either the large or the small purple fringed orchid growing in the June or July meadows, or the flaming yellow fringed orchid all orange and gold in the August meadows, has still much for which to live.
It was with an orchid of this genus that I had my most recent adventure. I had traveled with the Botanist into the heart of the pine-barrens. There may be places where more flowers and rarer flowers and sweeter flowers grow than in these barrens, but if so, the Botanist and I have never found the spot. From the early spring, when the water freezes in the hollow leaves of the pitcher-plant, to the last gleam of the orange polygala in the late fall, we are always finding something rare and new. On that August day we followed a dim path that led through thickets of scrub-oak and sweet pepper-bush. By its side grew clumps of deer-grass, with its purple-pink petals and masses of orange-colored stamens. Sometimes the path would disappear from sight in masses of hudsonia and sand-myrtle. Everywhere above the blueberry bushes flamed the regal Turk’s-cap lily, with its curved fire-red petals. On high the stalks towered above a tangle of lesser plants bearing great candelabra of glorious blossoms.
Finally, we came to a little ditch which some forgotten cranberry-grower had dug through the barrens to a long-deserted bog. On its side grew the rare thread-leafed sundew, with its long thread-like leaf covered with tiny red hairs and speckled thick with glittering drops of dew; while here and there little insects, which had alighted on the sweet, fatal drops, were enmeshed in the entangling hairs. Well above the line of strangled insects on which it fed, a pink blossom smiled unconcernedly. Like the attractive lady mentioned in Proverbs, her house goes down into the chambers of death.
As we followed the dike, the air was sweet with the perfume of white alder. The long stream of brown cedar-water was starred white with gleaming, fragrant water-lilies. In a marsh by the ditch grew clumps of cotton-grass or pussytoes, each stem of which bore a tuft of soft brown wool, like the down which a mother rabbit pulls from her breast when she lines her nest for her babies.