Twenty-fifth Orchid of the Season and Others

Neottia banksiana, also known as Listera caurina, is one of our most common orchids.  known as the Northwestern Twayblade, we see it most often in open forests and along trailsides, and that was where we found these examples in Olympic National Park.  At first glance it looks like the much rarer Neottia convallarioides, but is easily distinguished from that species by the blackish markings on the top of the lip.  It grows to 30 cm tall, though these plants were all smaller and carries up to fifteen insect-like flowers.  The friend from Canada who I was with when I photographed these found several plants with a third leaf, a much rarer form of the species, fma. trifolia.

Neottia banksiana

Neottia banksiana fma. trifolia

The same day we found the Neottias we also found Platanthera dilatata var. leucostachys and Platanthera stricta, the Tall White Northern Bog Orchis and the Slender Bog Orchis.  These were growing on wet banks and in wet ditches along the roadside, exactly where one would expect to find them.  Though we found hundreds of the Neottias, these were very few in number, due I am sure to the hot dry summer we've had.  These were still in good conditions but there were far fewer of them than previous years and we found none of the hybrid between the two species, Platanthera xestesii, Estes Rein Orchis, but that may have been due to overly enthusiastic mowing of the roadsides by the Park Service.

Platanthera dilatata var. leucostachys

Realized as I prepared this post that I never photographed Platanthera stricta.

Two Twayblades, a Coralroot and a Bog Orchid at Lake Elizabeth.

As we often do when traveling, we arranged our plans for a trip to Spokane on July 18, to include a at least one stop for photography.  On this trip we drove up to Lake Elizabeth in the North Cascades near Skyomish and Highway 2.  The Forest Service road to Lake Elizabeth has been closed for several years due to washouts, and though we had hiked up to the lake several times, have never been able to drive up.  The Forest Service finally has the road repaired and we were able to drive all the way, a distance of six or seven miles.

At the lake there is a poorly maintained trail around the lake that even requires some scrambling over and around fallen trees at the southeast end of the lake, but the area is a good spot to look for orchids and other wildflowers and we were not disappointed on this trip.  We had hoped to find the rare Chamisso's Orchid (Platanthera chorisiana), but did not find it even though this is the third time we've looked.  It was reported there a number of years ago, but has not been found since, though others have also looked for it.

We did find some old friends, though, two Twayblades, the Northwestern and Western Heart-leaved  Twayblades (Neottia banksiana and Neottia cordata var. nephrophylla), the latter in both its green and red color forms.  We also found the Western Coralroot (Corallorhiza mertensiana), but it was not as abundant as other years.  And we found the Slender Bog Orchis (Platanthera stricta), a plant we had seen two years ago, could not find last year, and now found again in abundance.

The Northwestern Twayblade was just starting to flower.  It is a plant around 20 cm tall with a spike of tiny green flowers distinguished by the blackish-green markings on the lip.  Like the other Neottias it has two opposite and very beautiful leaves halfway up the stem, though we found one plant with three leaves (shown above).

The Western Heart-leaved Twayblade is a tiny thing with plants as small as 5 cm and no larger than 20 (in this location) and with even smaller 5 to 10 mm green or reddish-green flowers that have a lip split into two narrow segments for half of the length.  We found both color forms.

The Northern Green Bog Orchis is one of the many green-flowered bog orchids that are rather difficult to tell apart.  The plants we saw were 10 to 50 cm tall, many-flowered, the flowers distinguished by the club-shaped spur.  These were growing in every wet spot along the road.

The Western Coralroot is a very common plant in our area, leafless and without chlorophyll and very variable in color.  These were a pale lavender with very pale lavender stems.  We found them on the east side of the lake where we had found them previously.