My favorite wild orchid...

I leave you this year with a photo of my favorite wild orchid...Cleistes bifaria. While it is the second wild orchid I ever saw in the wild, it has a very fond memory for me...when I was a teenager in Tallahassee, FL, we discovered a colony of these growing within walking distance of our house. Over the next 20 years, I watched this colony every year at the end of April, greeting their vanilla-scented flowers growing out from between the wiregrasses and fetterbushes where these made their home. You can read even more about this orchid on my website.


---Prem