Yellow and Orange Wild Flowers
Yellow and Orange Wild Flowers
The BLACKBERRY LILY (Gemmingia Ciminensis; Pardanthus Chinensis of Gray) is a member of the Iris family. It has flowers of a deep orange color, speckled irregularly with crimson
and purple within. The name Pardanthus is a derrivative of “Pardos”, meaning leopard, and “anthos”, meaning flower. Leopard Flower.
This plant grows one and a half to four feet tall and tends to be leafy. The leaves are similar to the iris: erect, folded blades of about eight to ten inches in length. The plant produces a fruit that looks like a blackberry too, thus the common name.
The blackberry lily likes to grow on roadsides and hills. It blooms from June to July and does well in climates such as those found from Connecticut to Georgia, westward to Indiana and Missouri.
This blackberry lily of gorgeous hue originally came from China. Escaping from gardens here and there, it was first reported as a wild flower at East Rock, Connecticut; other groups of vagabonds were met marching along the roadsides on Long Island; near Suffern, New York; then farther southward and westward, until it had attained a very respectable range.
The Large Yellow Lady’s Slipper; Whippoorwill’s Shoe; Yellow Moccasin Flower (Cypripedium hirsutum; C. pubescens of Gray), is a member of the Orchid family. This plant produces a solitary, large, showy flower of pale yellow and purple, lined with white hairs inside. The leaves are three to five inches long with parallel nerves.
This plant prefers to grow in moist or boggy woods and thickets and is good on hilly ground. It flowers from May to July and grows well from Alabama, westward to Minnesota and Nebraska.
Swinging outward from a leaf-clasped stem, this orchid attracts us by its flaunted beauty and decorative form from tip to root, not less than the aesthetic little bees for which its adornment and mechanism are so marvelously adapted. Doubtless the heavy, oily odor is an additional attraction to them. Parallel purplish lines, converging toward the circular opening of the pale yellow, inflated pouch, guide the visitor into a spacious banquet-hall (labellum) such as the pink lady’s slipper also entertains her guests in. Fine hairs within secrete tiny drops of fluid at their tips – a secretion which hardens into a brittle crust, like a syrup’s, when it dries.
These common orchids, which are not at all difficult to naturalize in a well-drained, shady spot in the garden, should be lifted with a good ball of earth and plenty of leaf-mould immediately after flowering.
The similar SMALL YELLOW LADY’S SLIPPER (C. parviflorum), a delicately fragrant orchid about half the size of its big sister, has a brighter yellow pouch, and occasionally its sepals and petals are purplish. As they usually grow in the same localities, and have the same blooming season, opportunities for comparison are not lacking. This fairer, sweeter, little orchid roams westward as far as the State of Washington.
The YELLOW FRINGED ORCHIS (Habenaria ciliaris) has bright yellow or orange flowers displayed in a showy, closely set oblong spike about three to six inches long. The lip of each flower is copiously fringed, similar to the white fringed orchis. Between the two of these plants, you’ll sometimes find pale yellow hybrid flowers. This plant grows one to two and a half feet tall and tends to be leafy. The leaves are lance-shaped and clasping.
This wild flower likes to grow in moist meadows and sandy bogs. It flowers from July to August and grows well in areas such as Vermont to Florida, and Ontario to Texas.
Where this brilliant, beautiful orchid and its lovely white sister grow together in the bog, the yellow fringed orchis will be found blooming a few days later. In general structure the plants closely resemble each other. Their similar method of enforcing payment for a sip of nectar concealed in a tube so narrow and deep none but a sphinx moth or butterfly may drain it all (though large bumblebees occasionally get some too, from brimming nectaries).
At dusk, when sphinx moths begin their rounds, it will be noticed that the white and yellow flowers remain conspicuous long after blossoms of other colors have melted into the general darkness. Such flowers as cater to these moths, if they have fragrance, emit it then most strongly, as an additional attraction. Sphinx moths suck while hovering over a tube, with their wings in exceedingly rapid motion, just like a hummingbird, for which the larger species are so often mistaken at twilight. This deep-hued orchid apparently attracts as many butterflies as sphinx moths, which show a predilection for the white species.
From Ontario and the Mississippi eastward, and southward to the Gulf, the TUBERCLED or SMALL PALE GREEN ORCHIS (H. flava) lifts a spire of inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers. It blooms in moist places, as most orchids do, since water with which to manufacture nectar enough to fill their deep spurs is a prime necessity.
Often found growing in the same bog with the tubercled species is the RAGGED or FRINGED GREEN ORCHIS (H. lacera), so inconspicuous we often overlook it unawares. Examine one of the dingy, greenish-yellow flowers that are set along the stern in a spike to make all the show in the world possible, each with its three-parted, spreading lip finely and irregularly cut into thread-like fringe to hail the passing butterfly, and we shall see that it, too, has made ingenious provision against the draining of its spur by a visitor without proper pay for his entertainment. Even without the gay color that butterflies ever delight in, these flowers contain so much nectar in their spurs, neither butterflies nor large bumblebees are long in hunting them out. In swamps and wet woodland from Nova Scotia to Georgia, and westward to the Mississippi, the ragged orchis blooms in June or July.
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