Dave Taft Every autumn there are one or two perfect days when winds from the north sweep summer south, combing the season’s thick clouds into mare’s-tails and sending its insects, birds and milkweed seeds packing. Recently, on a day like this, I stood in a scruffy Bronx field. Summer’s last pink flowers and goldenrods’ chrome yellow blooms were intertwined with the brick-red leaves and frosty blue berries of Virginia creeper. There was a biting chill in the air that heightened the earthy, sour scent of leaves decomposing.
What I had come to see poked through the colorful chaos. The icy white spires of the nodding ladies’-tresses orchid, Spiranthes cernua, stood as stoic reminders of a cold season ahead.
Nodding ladies’-tresses is named for its braided flower stems, evolved to suit eons of bee pollinators. Under the hand lens I had brought for the occasion, the crystalline flowers glittered like diamonds, forever young against the dying undergrowth.
It was easy to imagine myself as a bee, enchanted by the gleaming translucent throat of these tiny, fragrant trumpets of flowers. I can imagine a bee looking up at a stem full of 30 sparkling beauties with excitement.
The nectar is sweet on the fragrant lips of Spiranthes cernua; unlike so many orchids, these provide pollinators with rich rewards. Sit among them for a few quiet moments and a bumblebee or a honeybee will land at the bottom of a flower stem and wend its way upward, climbing the flowers like stairs, guided by the gracefully twisting flower spike.
Darwin himself noted this relationship in British Spiranthes species and speculated that it was simply easier for a bee to climb up than down. He also noted that the flowers were functionally male as they opened but matured into females. Since Spiranthes flowers are youngest at the tip of the spire, departing bees bear pollen to the female flowers at the base of the next.
Famous manipulators, ladies’-tresses generally grow in colonies, so when a bee reaches the top of a spire, she looks upon a field of dozens of others.
The rest is Pollination 101.
As a fan of native orchids, I have been tracking those species still found in the city’s five boroughs for years but could never find one growing in Brooklyn, my native borough. In 2009, a wet meadow along a road I travel to work had my attention. I had hunted plants there before but found little of note until, that September, after stepping out of my car and parting poison ivy vines and marsh ferns, I was greeted by the familiar white spires.
This was the first documented sighting of a native orchid in Brooklyn, as far as my research could determine, in more than six decades.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy soaked the meadow with three feet of salt water. I had my fingers crossed when I returned recently, only to find it mowed. Try as I might, I could find no evidence of this rarest of Brooklyn beauties. Had Hurricane Sandy’s high tides killed this tiny ghost of old Brooklyn? The fall of 2014 or successive years will tell.
