Skip to content

Winter green, but not evergreen

2009 January 29

Originally published January 31, 2009

By Ken Moore

Winter in the woods is the best time to appreciate land contours, the striking differences of tree bark, the stature of individual specimens and the leaves of evergreen wildflowers.

It’s also the best opportunity to locate two obscure native orchids. Of the two, cranefly orchid, Tipularia discolor, is the more common. Most often you’ll spy a single leaf or two here and there, sometimes an informal line of them and infrequently a loose mat of them. The one-and-a-half-to-three-plus-inch-long ovate, or egg-shaped, leaves are evident now. The leaf is green on the upper surface and burgundy below, sometimes almost purple on both surfaces.

The leaves of these orchids are busy now absorbing the winter sun and actively growing, manufacturing and storing essential nutrients and resources necessary for annual flowering and seed production. Though green now, these plants are not evergreen. They disappear in spring as the tree canopy shades the forest floor. They seem to be going into dormancy in reverse of most plants, but they remain very active underground, sending up a flowering stem in late summer, unnoticed by most woods walkers. I described the flowers in Flora last summer (Volume II No. XXII, Aug. 14, 2008).

If you want to see this beautiful little orchid in flower, you will have to make note of their locations so you’ll know precisely where to look when you return in the summer to catch them.

Mark several separate plants or populations, because, typical of native terrestrial orchids, they may flower several years in succession or they may sit out a year or two. Each summer’s discovery is a special treat. But every summer, some of them are flowering somewhere.

Cranefly has a close cousin, Aplectrum hyemale, sometimes called Adam-and-Eve orchid, because it has a tuberous root of a pair of swollen segments, and sometimes called putty root, because the crushed corms produce a mucilaginous fluid that was used by pioneers as a mending agent for cracked pottery.

This orchid has a life cycle similar to the cranefly orchid. You will have to keep a really keen eye focused to find the single leaf of puttyroot, because it occurs much less frequently, preferring a less acidic soil than is typical of most of our forests.

Locally, I’ve seen puttyroots scattered in the alluvial (flood plain) forest of the Triangle Land Conservancy’s Johnson Mill natural area between Turkey Farm and Mt. Sinai roads north of Chapel Hill. The leaf is about three times larger than that of cranefly and is distinguished by silvery stripes along the veins of an accordion-like pleated leaf. As with the cranefly orchid, you’ll have to make careful notes of where you find this leaf in the winter if you want to return to see it in flower in the early summer. It flowers a month or two earlier than its cousin.

So go walking now and plan your strategy for seeing these seldom-noticed forest beauties during the summer months.

Comments are closed.