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Club-spur Orchid | ||||||||||||
Platanthera clavellata | ||||||||||||
Back to orchids | ||||||||||||
This is one of my favorite orchids. It's tiny and pretty easy to miss. When I first came across them I was standing in a mass of sphagnum moss and looked down and found them. Since then I have found more than a few stations of them and ALL of them were in sphagnum. Plant glabrous, arising from a cluster of fleshy, thickened roots, 10-33 cm tall. Leaf 1, oblanceolate to obovate, attached just below the middle of the stem (although sometimes appearing basal), 6.5-18 cm long and 1.4-5 cm wide, ascending, stem with 1-2 reduced to linear-lanceolate bracts above the leaf. Inflorescence a loose raceme, 5-15 flowered, the flowers only incompletely resupinate and thus appearing "askew"; flowers yellowish-green to green to whitish-green, each flower subtended by a small, lance-linear, acuminate bract. Sepals ovate, concave, 2-5 mm long and 1.5-3 mm wide, colored as flowers; dorsal sepal connivent with petals over the column, lateral sepals slightly spreading. Petals similar to sepals, connivent with dorsal sepal over the column, colored as flowers. Labellum oblong to quadrate with the apex shallowly three-lobed, 3-6 mm long and 1-3 mm wide, colored as flowers, base of labellum with a strongly clubbed (occasionally appearing scrotiform at the tip) nectar spur projecting behind, about 10 mm long. |
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