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Category Archives: orchids

orchids

Discovery of the week: Orchid

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, someone else's photos

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Cryptostylis subulata, large tongue orchid

This discovery wasn't mine, unfortunately. My friend has a spotted gum forest behind her house and there a visitor found a colony of large tongue orchids (Cryptostylis subulata), uneaten and thriving. This was exactly the species we'd been stalking on the road to Congo before the volcano trip. The colony there was unobliging and refused to flower for us, obviously because it was too early, although their flowering period is listed October – March. I'm partial to tongue orchids because their leaves aren't shy. They poke up and announce their presence rather than sequestering their identity in thick leaf litter. They're pollinated by ichneumon wasps as they try to mate with the flower lip, yet another deception practised by orchidaceae in the interests of procreation.

The enterprising photographer, Lynda Wightman, used toilet paper as background to get a clear shot.

 

 

For more photos see

http://www.retiredaussies.com/ColinsHome%20Page/OrchidsTas/Cryptostylis/Cryptostylis%20subulata/Cryptostylis%20subulata%20Large%20Tongue%20Orchid.htm

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

Snake orchids

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Cymbidium suave, snake orchid

To find a perfect Cymbidium suave (snake orchid) head up Bullocky's Hut Road until it joins Big Rock Road on its journey to the highway. As you get out of the ute, look up and to your right and you'll see a stunning arrangement by Ma Nature (thanks Gilly!) in the fork of a dark old tree: seven sprays spilling down the trunk. Photography is a problem if you want to get the whole composition, because you have to look up into the glare of the sky. The best shots involved J standing precariously on the slightly shattered milk crate he uses to carry the night's supply of firewood, while I held an ineffectual hand at the ready in case the whole edifice tumbled.

 

 

 

 

 

Nearby is a far more accessible plant of equivalent size, artistically placed against a splotched grey trunk, but a wallaby or a wombat has been a feasting on the flower sprays and there are only two left. The remaining thick buds don't have much chance of reaching flowerhood.

 

 

 

I know I over-posted on snake orchids last year, but this display was irresistible, and it's not the same plant as any of those of 2014.

https://morselsandscraps3.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/beating-the-wallaby-beaten-by-light/

https://morselsandscraps3.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/by-the-highway/

https://morselsandscraps3.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/river-road-the-climax/

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

A knock at the door

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

sun orchid, Thelymitra ixioides

Once upon a time, there was a knock at the door of a house in the bush. The man who owned the house was feeling mellow and he invited the two strangers in. They talked about god for a while, and then the conversation turned to orchids.

Two years later, a handwritten list appeared on the doorstep: a list of all the orchids the visitors had seen in the Eurobodalla, complete with botanical names and location notes.

Then a phone call: “If you want to see sun orchids, turn off the highway along C Ridge. Go to the old forestry log dump, a clearing about the size of a football field, with a bit of debris in the middle. Look along the western edge, in amongst the wattles and other regrowth. They're flowering there, about knee high, and powder blue.”

And indeed they were.

 

 

 

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Purple donkey orchid: Diuris punctata

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Congo to Meringo, Diuris punctata, Dreaming track, purple donkey orchid

This portrait gallery is for Restlessjo, to whom I promised the next orchid I stumbled across.


First sighting of an orchid I've never seen before is always very exciting. The list is growing – duck orchid, bearded orchid, spiral orchid, glossodia: I've spotted these with my own eyes. Other acquaintances have been by courtesy of J's eyes.

This one was the youngest thing we saw in a day's ramble: considerably younger than the basalt (28 million years) and the sandstone (25 million).

Its petals were freshly unfurled, still slightly ruffled by their sojourn in the bud casing. The bronze sepals were longer than any I have seen on donkey orchids and the whole inflorescence was larger. There it was sitting splendidly beside the track, pinky purple, with yellow in its throat, and a white sticky disc on the upright sepal, just waiting for a native bee pollinator. Instead it had an enraptured woman, saying loudly “What is this? What is this?”

Then the homage began: flat on my belly with two cameras alternating, determined not to miss out on this special gift at the end of a day of gifts.

 

 

 

I'll be away for a few weeks, holidaying with an orchid loving friend. I probably won't be visiting your blogs or posting many of my own, except scheduled ones, until I return home. Enjoy the break!

 

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

Revisiting rock orchids

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

lichen, Nerrigundah Ridge, rock orchids, Thelychiton speciosus

This post is for Tish Farrell who visited English orchids near the windmill at Much Wenlock and shared them with me

 

Each year we make a spring pilgrimage to Nerrigundah Ridge when the rock orchids are flowering. Armed with a stick and sturdy boots, we walk up a rocky ridge through spurts of flowering grass, past bright yellow guinea flowers, stepping on conglomerated and broken rocks, many covered with lichen and moss: doubly cautious because the rocks are loose and it’s the beginning of snake season. We find a clump of rocks with healthy-looking orchid leaves but no flowers. But the Ridge doesn’t disappoint us. There they are, three sprays of creamy-white orchids with their maroon striped and freckled throats, “white girls flowering out of stone / and leaning on the green air” as Douglas Stewart describes them.

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Eating orchids

24 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Aboriginal farming, Beth Gott, Tim Low, tubers

It pays to leaf through old copies of the Australian natural history magazine, before depositing them in the recycle bin. Doing just this I found an article by Tim Low in vol 22, no 5, Winter 1987. He was conducting a long-term study of the traditional foods of Aborigines, and was alerted by a botanist, Beth Gott, to the food potential of orchid tubers. She wrote about finding a colony of Pterostylis nutans, at a density of 440 plants per square metre, yielding 800 tiny tubers weighing 126 grams. Of course I was fascinated, after my recent encounter with nodding greenhoods, and so was Tim Low.

He embarked upon a taste-testing tour. Here are his findings.

Glossodia major (common wax lip). It has a single egg-shaped tuber with a pointed tip and a watery slightly sweet flavour with a bitter after taste. In his words “not nice.”

Common wax lip (my photo)

Diuris maculata (leopard orchid). This one has two bullet shaped tubers, 3cm long and 6mm wide. It is glutinous, starchy, filling and “stuck cloyingly to my gums.”

Pterostyilis longifolia (tall greenhood). Sporting a pair of globular tubers, 12 mm broad, it tastes “watery and bitter.”
 

The two pea-sized white tubers of Caladenia carnea (pink fingers) tasted “sweet and juicy”.

Pink fingers (my photo)

Dipodium punctatum (hyacinth orchid) has one of the largest tubers, six fibrous roots, 8 mm thick and longer than a finger, which need cooking to make them palatable. Their rival for size is Gastrodia sesamoides (potato orchid). He doesn't comment on its flavour.

Hyacinth orchid and Potato orchid (my photos)

His awards for “especially tasty” go to the walnut sized potatoes of Lyperanthus suaveolens (brown beaks) and the “fragrantly flavoured starch” of the horned orchid, Orthoceras strictum.

Tubers of Brown beaks, from the article

In The biggest estate on earth, a weighty account of how Aboriginal people shaped the Australian landscape, Bill Gammage quotes Sturt's 1849 journal as he explored in what is now western Victoria / South Australia.

On the other side of Mt Terrible the country is very scrubby for some miles, until, all at once, you burst upon the narrow but beautiful valley of Mypunga … covered with orchidaceous plants of every colour, amidst a profusion of the richest vegetation.

Gammage notes that many orchids bloom after fire, and this quotation is part of his extended argument about how Aborigines managed the land with fire. These orchids weren't there by accident, but as part of a regime of harnessing wild flowers and animals for food: a form of farming in fact.

In his article Low offers a couple of interesting sidelights on orchids as food, for people other than the traditional owners of this country.

He quotes the Australian botanist, Joseph Maiden, who wrote in 1898: There is hardly a country boy who has not eaten … the tubers of numerous kinds of terrestrial orchids.

He also records an extract from Anne Pratt's 1891 book, “Flowering plants, grasses, sedges and ferns of Great Britain”, which eulogises the properties of orchid starch or salep / saloop in a working man's diet.

Salep is little used now in this country; but less than a century since, the Saloop-house was much frequented, and the substance was a favourite repast of porters, coal-bearers, and other hard-working men. It is said to contain more nutritious matter in proportion to its bulk than any other known root, and an ounce of salep was considered to afford support to a man for a day; hence those who travel in uninhibited countries have greatly prized so portable a vegetable food.

Many of the orchids Low samples are familiar to me, but I'd never thought of them as a food source. I won't be decimating the ranks of any colonies I find by conducting my own taste testing. I'll take Tim Low's word for it and thank him for giving me another dimension to my understanding of orchids.

 

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Behind Bengello

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

"Snugglepot and Cuddlepie", banksia, behind Bangello Beach, gumnuts, moss, nodding greenhood, Pterostylis nutans, wattle

Last week, I visited my coincidentally Polish accountant to sort out my tax and ask financial questions from the abyss of my financial ignorance. After such an encounter, I usually find an unwalked beach and explore with a picnic lunch. This time it was high tide, and I don’t walk on beaches at high tide.

So I stopped at a sandy track, guarded by frantically flowering wattle, and stumbled across six prolific colonies of greenhood orchids: Pterostylis nutans I think. They were hiding amongst bracken just off the track, heads demurely facing the ground. In each colony, I counted at least 30 plants. If I saw six colonies I reckon there’d be many more: if I counted 30 plants it would have to be a conservative estimate.

But the orchids weren’t the only treasures. There was moss: soft spring green; spiky, star-like pinky-red and green; flowers (are they flowers?) wavering on the end of thin red stalks.

Mosses

Then there were the many faces of banksias: flower; seed pods opened; hairy dead flowers; dead flowers broken open into red; stippled bark, some showing signs of fire; and closed seed pods. Gumnuts, round urns, littered the ground wherever there were eucalypts.

May Gibbs, in her children’s book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, transformed banksia cones into villians, the Big Bad Banksiamen, and gumnuts into the characters of the title, a pair of gumnut babies. My leather bound copy was a gift from J on our third wedding anniversary, a memento of my childhood pleasure in this Australian classic.

Banksias

Eucalypt gumnuts

Everywhere was the brightness of wattle, which has to be called golden, and which is one of the signatures of home for me.

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

A nice little old lady in transit

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in flying, orchids, photos

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

"The salt of the earth", Helsinki airport, Singapore airport, travelling encounters

I begin writing this at Singapore Changi airport, en route home. The whole journey will take me about forty hours, a number that filled me with dread when I did eve-of-departure, 2 am calculations.

My last morning in Warsaw was full of pleasures: when I rolled up to the apartment for the last time, I was greeted by two naked kidlets who deserted me at the sound of an ambulance siren. I travelled out to Pruskòw with them to leave them with their Polish grandparents for the weekend, while their parents travel 400 km for a wedding. Ola gave me my last Polish soup, and Jurek told me with relish that the chicken in it was running around that morning.

Back in Warsaw, my daughter and I treated ourselves to a double gelato, me guava, her grapefruit. The menu offered vast range, including beetroot, and other flavours, “as they occur to us.” There was a side menu for dog ice cream. Then it was time to change, finalise the pack and leave. My son-in-law popped in for a third final farewell. My last sight of family in Warsaw was my tall elegant daughter striding along the pavement to catch a tram for work as the surly taxi driver took me to the airport.

At the airport insanely early, I bought my first duty free goods, peppermints worth $3 AUD, and was startled to be asked for my boarding pass. I filled in time exchanging grins with a delightful infant and her Chinese grandfather; indulging in racial profiling as I guessed nationality from garb and behaviour; and spinning tales out of encounters I observed. I watched people eagerly entering a glass-walled room, like an extra large lift, no seating and surreal with cigarette butts – my first encounter with an airport smoking room. I wondered idly, as one does in transit, what a room full of blogging addicts frantically typing away and post-processing their photos would look like to the uninitiated non-addict.

For the first time in many trips I asked for a window seat, so I could survey Poland from the air for the short leg of the Long Journey. Instead, I had a very enjoyable conversation with a charming Finn, who introduced himself as I sat down. The conversation was wide ranging: politics, economics, travel, Finland's anti-bullying campaign and compulsory army service, his childhood in Cairo and Iran, children, careers (his future, mine past), summer holidays at the family house in the north, education, the long winter dark and the long summer light, blogging, and speaking many languages. Between bursts of conversation, I glimpsed, briefly and at last, the Baltic coast. As we began our descent into Helsinki, I saw the indented coastline and the forest, even a patch on the verge of the airport, and suddenly I wanted to add Finland to my side-trips-from-Poland list.

 

Baltic coastline - faint line at bottom left!

Leaving Warsaw: approaching Helsinki: view from Helsinki airport

 

 

Helsinki to Singapore was a twelve hour flight, leaving as last light left the sky at midnight. I struck it lucky: an aisle seat with an empty window seat beside me, two paces to the loo, and pretty well non-stop sleep. I was dozing before take-off and only woke for food. I used one blanket for warmth and the other to hood my drop-jawed drooling self, tucked two pillows wherever I wanted, and fell into somewhat haunted slumber full of my twinlets. I read two pages of Wanderlust: a history of walking after a 2 pm (somewhere) breakfast, and dropped off again. I only woke as someone lent over me to open the blinds for landing. I looked out the window and photographed as we landed, and I was ready for the long hike to the not-open-for-two-hours departure gate at Changi.

 

Approaching Singapore

 

Even the airport had its pleasures. Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust has a chapter called “Paris, or botanising on the asphalt”. I botanised at the airport – orchids, palms, trees inside and out. Her chapter isn't at all about botanising plants, and mine went beyond plants too: garish neon orchids and a fountain-like splay of neon; shops, mainly empty except for their glossy goods. Then there were people, increasingly now Australians, which is not an unmitigated delight: maybe banalities sound more interesting in a language you can't understand. Little children, four in one family, rode past on suitcases shaped like animals and vehicles; another pair leapt from line to line of the floor patterns; people in wheel chairs led a procession of family; tired travellers in transit sprawled or sat staring vacantly, life suspended. In the loo a child-sized basin had a stencil of the owl and the pussycat. The departure boards were fascinating – all these places I've never heard of, let alone visited.

 

 

 

Then I was back on the plane for the last leg. No empty seat beside me this time. A woman giggling at her in-flight entertainment, on her way to a reunion with school friends from forty years ago. A man in front of me needing a sick bag for landing. For me, sleep till the last few hours and the greatest disappointment of the whole journey: the Moroccan chicken salad had run out. The movie selection was very tempting, but I settled for a doco, The Salt of the Earth, about Brazilian-French photographer, Sebastião Salgado, co-directed by Wim Wenders and Salgado's son, Juliano Salgado. His photos were magnificent, although the subject matter was often gruelling: he filmed death in Rwanda and the Congo, as well as life untouched by civilisation in Siberia and the Amazon, and his reclamation of forest when he returned to Brazil from exile.

At Sydney airport, I grabbed a shower, uninvitingly cold; and overheard snippet of conversation in Polish (or am I delusional? Everyone seemed to be saying 'dobrze'.) A young woman I was chatting to over coffee answered her phone and said: “I'm just talking to a nice little old lady.” I was back in Australia.

 

Waiting for the bus at Sydney airport

 

 

Codas:

I nearly didn't make it home on schedule. In a lunchtime stupor in Nowra, I hopped on a bus, wondered why my water bottle wasn't where I left it, and realised in the nick of time that I'd got on the bus back to Sydney.

When I reached Bodalla at 4.30, as daylight faded, I was met by both J and our son, so I “would feel wanted”. J had a pot of vegetable soup for us to take home, and H a baked dinner ready to cook and orange juice chilling.

I faded into sleep about 7 and slept cosy around the clock.

 

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Beating the wallaby: beaten by light.

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by morselsandscraps in orchids, photos

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Cymbidium suave, snake orchid

Yesterday morning I whizzed out to the bush block to visit the snake orchid, Cymbidium suave, spotted by my weekend companion just off the track where Big Rock Road meets Bullocky's Hut Road. There were a number of clumps: one at ground level already feasted on by a prowling macropod, and two high in trees beyond the reach of geriatrics who are no longer eager to climb ladders to photograph orchids. However, a stump at crouch level was filled with strappy leaves and a flourish of creamy-green flowers, with their maroon-splotched throats and pink blush on the underside of the petals.

The morning light was a bit glary, and I hadn't yet spent five hours at a photography workshop, aimed at moving me beyond CIM (Complete Idiot Mode) – which is apparently how I have taken all the photos on this blog. I'll try for more expert photos at the weekend, if the wallaby hasn't beaten me to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to see what not-so-geriatric ladder-climbers found high in a casuarina, look at

http://morselsandscraps.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/tongue-orchid-or-thumbnail-orchid-dockrillia-linguiformis/ (these photos mostly taken by JRM, although I too climbed.)

For other Eurobodalla orchids, you can peruse a gallery at

https://picasaweb.google.com/115521452370583053305/OrchidSpeciesSpottedInEurobodalla#

 

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