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May 2009
Orchids in our Midst

Orchids in our Midst

They seduce. They elude. It’s a marvel they can grow at all. We explore the flamboyant enigmas of our woods, bogs, and meadows.

May 18, 2009 Emily Betz Tyra

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As with all symbiotic creatures, this mutual gift of life between fungus and flower demands a delicate balance.

Yet modern science allows us to grow orchids, to contrive the fungal relationship in a flask in a way that was once believed impossible for humans to simulate. Now for the everyday botanist, hardy European or exotic orchid varieties are relatively simple, beautiful and fascinating to cultivate. Michigan species remain an enigma. They are too difficult and costly to propagate from seed, and chances are a seedling would never make it in a backyard—if a habitat changes in any subtle way, the plant may perish.

That’s why poachers’ misguided attempts to remove orchids from a native habitat and cultivate them in their own yards or in pots can be a dismal, tragic failure.

So there remains something intrinsically captivating about seeing them in the wild—the difference between gorillas in the mist and gorillas in the zoo.
Up North, you still have opportunity to find orchids living on their own. Many of Michigan’s 58 native orchids find our region’s bogs, wet woods and meadows ideal. Some of our native orchids, like the calypso or yellow fringed orchid, are threatened. Many in the region are rare because of illegal harvesting and development.

It’s a small thrill to know that a speck of microscopic orchid dust can land in our midst and find all around it what it needs to become a lady’s slipper. That marvel seems reason enough to hold that habitat near, to keep orchid turf from being destroyed, unwittingly or otherwise. I realized it standing in the in the woods near Northport, the musk of wet earth in my nose, just the right amount of sun leaking through the hemlocks above me, and the sea of lady’s slippers before me: Context, indeed, is everything.

Find our more about wild orchids in Northern Michigan.