Orchids

More Pink and Red Wild Flowers from the Orchid Family

Every wild orchid features six floral leaves. One is usually in a strange form though - pouch shaped, a cornicopia filled with nectar, or a flaunted, fringed banner shape. If looked at right, sometimes orchids can look like they're masquerading in the disguise of bees, moths, frogs, birds, or butterflies.

The Showy, Gay, Or Spring Orchis (Orchis spectabilis) has both deep and light shaded purplish pink flowers with a lip of white on them. The sit atop pikes, are thick in texture and grow from three to six inches long. They're also nicely fragrant. The plant itself grows just four to twelve inches tall and the stem is thick, fleshy and five-sided. The leaves are large, broad and oval shaped with a glossy green on top and silvery on the underside. This plant produces a seed pod of about one inch long that's sharply angled.

These wild flowers like to grow in rich, moist woods, especially under hemlocks. They bloom from April to June and do well in the Southern States, westward to Nebraska.


The Rose Or Sweet Pogonia Orchid is also called Snake-Mouth (Pogonia ophioglossoides). These orchids have pale rose pink fragrant flowers about one inch long. The flowers can actually smell like fresh red raspberries. There's usually just one solitary flower in bloom at the end of a stem that's eight to fifteen inches high, and subtended by a leaf-like bract.

This flower prefers to grow in swamps and low meadows, and it flowers from June to July. It does well from Canada to Florida, and westward to Kansas.


Arethusa; Indian Pink (Arethusa bulbosa). This orchid has just one bright purple pink flower of one to two inches in lenth. It smells like violets. There's just one leaf and it hides until the flower blooms, then it grows to about six inches. This orchid also has a ribbed seed capsule that grows about one inch long, but it doesn't often mature.

The Arethusa prefers to grow in northern bogs and swamps, and flowers from May to June. Nice growing areas for it include North Carolina, Indiana and Northward.

Another charming, but much smaller, orchid, hides in cool, peaty bogs from Canada and the Northern United States to California, and southward in the Rockies to Arizona, is the CALYPSO (Calypso bulbosa). It is a solitary little flower, standing out from the top of a jointed scape that never rises more than six inches from the solid bulb, hidden in the moss, nor boasts more than one nearly round leaf near its base. The blossom itself suggests one of the lady's slipper orchids, with its rosy purple, narrow, pointed sepals and petals clustered at the top above a large, sac-shaped, whitish lip. The latter is divided into two parts, heavily blotched with cinnamon brown, and woolly with a patch of yellow hairs near the point of the division. The Calypso Orchid bloms from May to June.