When people think of orchids, they picture the tropical orchids that can be bought at supermarkets- showy moth orchids in vibrant shades of pink and purple.
These tropical orchids are epiphytic, meaning they perch in the crook of trees, but there are also many species of terrestrial orchids, and 50 of these live in Tennessee.
David Clark, a newer Tennessee Naturalist, has a fascination with orchids, some might say an obsession. He heard about the elusive mountain lady slipper while a member of the Native Plant Society in Oregon and spent the better part of 20 years searching for it.
When he discovered a small population in a moist forest setting with dappled sunlight, he pinned the location and came back year after year to photograph them.
“When I first met David in Oregon about 15 years ago after we had both gone through painful divorces, I bought him a uniquely colored moth orchid and facetiously quipped, ‘Keep this orchid alive. As long as it survives, so will our relationship,’” said Kristi DuBois, master gardener.
“David took this as a challenge, so much so that when we moved from Oregon to Tennessee four years ago to care for my parents, he set up a battery-generated light system in the back of our car to give the orchid enough light on its cross-country journey,” said Dubois. “Needless to say, the orchid is still alive today; so is our relationship and David’s quest for orchids, now in the wilds of Tennessee.”
Many Tennesseans are familiar with and fond of pink lady slippers, but they may not realize that these forest flowers are orchids.
According to Bart Jones in The Conservationist, orchids are unique in the plant world because their male and female reproductive parts stand together in the column of one plant.
Orchids have three petals and three outer sepals, and the middle petal is a labellum, or lip, that can be a tube or a pouch as in lady slippers. An orchid’s dust-like seeds must be fed with carbohydrates by mycorrhizal fungi to germinate.
This symbiotic relationship with very specific soil fungi means that digging up a wild orchid to plant in your garden is usually a death sentence to the plant.
This is the case for the showy and much beloved pink lady slipper, often found in clusters on the Cumberland Plateau in April and May, but increasingly less so because of ill informed or unethical plant collectors.
Other lady slippers found on the Plateau in the spring but seldom seen are the large yellow lady slipper and the Kentucky lady slipper with its cream-colored pouch and maroon sepals.
Lady slippers are unusual orchids in that they provide no nectar for pollinators, says Jones, but they still lure bees into their slipper, or pouch, with deceptive landing strips of lines and spots.
When a bee gets temporarily trapped in the pouch, it brushes against the orchid’s column and its sticky pollen, eventually escaping and carrying the pollen away to fertilize another flower.
Whereas lady slippers stop hikers in their tracks with their large conspicuous pouches standing alone on a single stalk, fringed orchids create a splash with dozens of brightly colored flowers encircling a long spike. The showy inflorescences that come in vibrant shades of orange, yellow, purple or green live in moist meadows or bogs and are a favorite of butterflies.
Jones says that butterflies poke their heads into the long spurs of the tiny flowers and emerge with sticky pads of pollen stuck to their heads like horns, which they then carry to the stigma of other flowers for pollination.
The most common fringed orchid on the plateau is the yellow fringed orchid, a misnomer because it is in fact bright orange.
Blooming from mid-July through September, yellow fringed orchids have multitudes of orchid-shaped flowers with whiskered labellum, or lips. They can be occasionally found along the road in sunny, drainage ditches.
A far less common fringed orchid on the plateau is actually called the purple fringeless orchid because the lower lips of its small flowers are toothed, not fringed.
“You may be lucky to see these rare but beautiful orchids blooming in boggy areas in the summer,” said Dubois.
Tennessee orchids that you might miss because of their tiny white flowers are ladies’ tresses.
Dainty tubular flowers spiral around a long stem like an elegantly braided lady’s tress, making them a macro photographer’s dream.
Ladies’ tresses are the largest genus of orchids in Tennessee because their habitat can range from swamps and bogs to dry disturbed lawns, explains Jones. Depending on the species, they bloom from spring to late fall.
There are several unique orchids in Tennessee. One particularly tropical looking orchid is the spreading pogonia. These singular pink or white flowers make a statement with wide open “mouths” and striped ‘tongues.’
Their long thin mahogany sepals thrust into the air, resembling helicopter propellers. Spreading pogonias stand proud in meadow bogs in the spring.
With their flashy colors and unique anatomy, orchids are endlessly fascinating to professional and amateur botanists and photographers.
Tennessee is fortunate to have many native terrestrial orchids.
“The next time you are out in a wild area and catch sight of an orchid, get down on your hands and knees and really look at its intricate form,” said Dubois. “Orchids are best observed up close and personal.”