Another One for my Gray-scale Orchid Project

The other little orchid I’ve been watching for blooms finally began its show this morning. As I suspected, it is a tway-blade orchid (Liparis liliifolius). I’m going to add this one to my gray-scale orchid project – The Arkansas Orchid Series.

Once the local ones are done, I’ll be searching for good locations or photos of the ones I am lacking, like the Lady’s Slippers.

On the bird front, however, I have another good eagle photo from photographer John Craig. Actually I have several good photos from him I’d like to paint, but I want to finish the first grayscale orchid first. And I have more game birds from Jami Linder, and Terry Stanfill is always filling his FB timeline with birds I’d like to paint. So much inspiration and so little time.

About Tway-Blade Orchids

There’s a colony of these on the slope below the pond, and I wrote about finding those a few years ago. But I’ve never found them away from that location. This one is in the ginseng habitat garden. I haven’t checked yet to see if the ones below the pond are still there. Unless they die out periodically, or something else happened to them, they should be.

The blooms don’t last very long. It’s not a very conspicuous flower, and I’ve only seen them growing in deep shade. Like many other native plants, they probably have fairly specific growing conditions, too. All this combined is probably why I’ve never seen them in nurseries anywhere for sale. But I’m always happy to see them when I can catch them blooming out here at Wild Ozark. This is only the second year I’ve been able to do so. It does produce a seed pod, as I’ve seen the dried and withered stems among the fresh ones. From what I’ve read, the plant from this year will die back and next year’s plant will come from a new corm it produces during this season. So the same plant doesn’t come back time and time again.

Here’s a good post from VA with really nice photos. And the author is right – to really appreciate the flowers you need to get down to ground. I brought a towel out to the woods with me today to give me a drier spot to lie. It rained last night.

About the Gray-scale Orchid Project

For this series, I’m only going to focus on the orchids of Wild Ozark. Maybe eventually I’ll get to the other orchids that grow in Arkansas that aren’t found here, but there’s enough right here to get a good start.

The first one is the Showy Orchid I’m working on now. I’ll update that page to be a progress page for that painting soon. Right now it rambles. Like this one does, lol. I’ll update this one too, so that it does a better job of showing the progression once I get to painting this one.

Next up in the Gray-scale Orchid project will be this Tway-Blade, and then I will try to catch the Adam and Eve blooming. I believe that Lady’s Tresses are also orchids, and we have those here as well. Arkansas has other orchids, but those are the only ones I’ve seen here.