Concatenation at Meroo

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Meroo NP

On my son's recommendation and following his verbal mud map, I turned off the highway just south of Tabourie. The road lived up to the best traditions of national parks roads, and soon became so split-level I was almost driving with the car on its side. My first thought was that it was a case of intergenerational definitions of “good road”. Then I realised my son is well aware of my timidity, and remembered he mentioned a second road, not much further on. So I turned left again, and found a drivable road through tall trees. After a picnic in the day use area I followed a trail towards the sea.

In no more than 300 metres, I saw three species in flower: a colony of tiny orchids (Eriochilus petricola I think – again I failed to photograph the leaf!); Lambertia formosa; and Banksia spinulosa.

 

 

 

These three each have a special connection with a very old friend of mine, and our jaunts in search of wildflowers. When I emailed her with this serendipitous concatenation, she said ” Oh yes, but what you didn't know is that my grandmother's house was called Meroo.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Wasp orchid: Chiloglottis dyphilia

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Chiloglottis dyphylia, pseudo-copulation, Thynnine wasp

It’s been raining for a week: not a deluge, just continuous and soaking. On Sunday it ‘s worn itself out and offers only an occasional splutter of drops. I grab my sturdy walking stick (once a slender spotted gum) and climb down the giant stairs into the bush below the house.

I know where the patch of wasp orchids is. I only have to follow the pipe leading down to the creek, although I make doubly sure by following my companion. He’s struggling with a long piece of recalcitrant piping, which doesn’t seem keen to cross the creek to become the frame of a garden dome.

There are three orchids in a little nook between logs. They are tiny, almost to the point of invisibility and I am grateful for my guide, whose orchid eyes are superior to mine once he disentangles himself from his snaking companion.

Two of the orchids are beginning to droop and fold, but the third one is at its peak. I contort myself to kneel within photographic reach. Maybe I’ll add a small kneeling pillow to my orchid-hunting gear. After all, they use them in churches, and my worship these days is in devotion to orchids. I notice with some horror that  my camera battery is fading and snap frantically hoping to finish  before it dies. The camera is my only hope of seeing the wasp orchid clearly because it is so small.

The leaves are the most visible part, glossy green after the rain. There are more leaves there than there will be flowers in this vegetative colony. They are there both immediately before and after the flowering, but they disappear between flowerings.  As usual my camera doesn’t want to focus on both flower and leaves.

The flower is tiny, barely as big as my little fingernail. However, small is no barrier to intricacy and cunning. Orchids have been evolving for 80 million years, (so Ziegler claims – a Google search got swamped by sites for cultivationg orchids in your garden) and they’ve made good use of the time, many of them co-evolving with their insect pollinators. Their bilateral symmetry allows them to impersonate insects convincingly, which is exactly what the wasp orchid does, using pseudo-copulation to ensure the survival of the species.

The labellum which is covered in rich crimson calli resembles the body of the wingless female Thynnine wasp and thereby attracts the male Thynnine. What satisfies the orchid – the collection of its pollinia with its cargo of pollen to be transported elsewhere – has to leave the pollinating wasp frustrated.  A frustrated copulater will go seeking sexual fulfilment elsewhere, with a bit of luck (for the orchid) with another wasp orchid, which it will then pollinate.

About a third of all orchids – 9000 species – use this kind of trick with varying degrees of sophistication and reward for the lustful insect. Such deception is just one of what Darwin calls the “beautiful contrivances” of orchids. And it happens on a hillside near Bodalla.

My library of orchid books is growing.

Christian Ziegler Deceptive beauties: the world of wild orchids is a collection of wonderful images, from Borneo, Panama, the Swiss Alps and even Australia, with text that discusses orchid distribution, evolution, and pollination. I owe it for my understanding of pseudo copulation and Annette for giving it to me.

I’ve also discovered, but not yet acquired, Charles Darwin’s cogitations on orchids: The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.

Hyacinth orchids: Dipodium punctatum

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Douglas Stewart, Eucalypts: a celebration

These orchids are the most resplendent and noticeable of all the species I’ve spotted so far.  A splash of pink on a tall scape against a spotted gum, sometimes up to my waist (I’m beginning the long journey to scientific measurement!), they can’t be missed. I’ve even spotted them from the car as I drive along the road into Potato Point.

However they are also the most recalcitrant to the camera. Somehow with them I lose my newly acquired mastery of depth of field. Good clear images of the splotched sepals guarantees a blurred labellum, and the luxuriance of blooms – up to 60 on a scape -often leads to photographic confusion and lack of focal point.

The photographer doesn’t have the luxury of the painter, who can gently relocate flowers in the interests of composition and clarity. To add to my catalogue of complaints, any idea of photographing the tall stems against the backgound of the bush is a delusion. I now sympathise with my father’s frustrated desire to photograph a white sheep on a green hill against the sunset. The real world doesn’t vouchsafe such things, except to the devout and devoted expert.

For the last few weeks I’ve made a short pilgrimage to a colony of hyacinth orchids near the house on the bush block where I spend weekends. They develop slowly, so I’ve managed to capture their progress from a tip, barely out of the ground,

to a tall scape with buds beginning to plump and reveal the characteristic speckles.

If I download a pile of disastrous shots, I only have to walk down past the clothesline for another attempt … and another … and another.

After two photographic sessions on the same day, and close examination of the plants in nature and on the screen, I suddenly realise that I am possibly visiting two species, not one. One lot of scapes is delicate and pale green; the other thick, almost woody, and maroon. This is exciting, but also a bit daunting, because it means I’ll need to expend ID energy again, and I thought I had this one nailed. Fortunately, there aren’t hundreds of cousins to choose from in this species.

My interest seems to augur doom for orchids. Fire took the greenhood; a tractor disappeared sun orchids and glossodias. And this is what I found on my last visit to the hyacinth colony –

the budding top of the scape neatly decapitated. This plant won’t continue through its cycle to seed pods.

As I rhapsodised in praise of Dipodium punctatum, I remembered that Douglas Stewart has written a number of poems about orchids. I tracked down hyacinth orchids in a poem called Aboriginal axe, and found this to undermine the glory:

Lovely and leprous, flushed and spotted /  The hyacinth orchid bloomed and rotted. 

I can handle rotted, but leprous is a bit hard to take. However he does restore some beauty in a later line:

The orchid stands up glowing and tall.

That however wasn’t the end of the dark side. Reading Eucalypts: a celebration  by John Wrigley and Murray Fagg  I found that hyacinth orchids are also hemi-parasitic. I’d noticed that they seemed to particularly enjoy the company of spotted gums (Corymbia maculata). Wrigley and Fagg tell me they grow in the leaf litter at the foot of eucalypts and use a fungus to link with their host so they can draw on it for sustenance. At least as hemi-parasites they bear some of the burden of their own life through photosynthesis.

Ten minutes with George Raper

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Dendrobium speciosum, First Fleet watercolour artist, George Raper, National Library of Australia

George Raper was only 17 when he sailed for Australia with the First Fleet on board the Sirius in 1787. He carried with him a box of the newly-invented watercolour tablets, which cost him two month’s pay. He made such good use of his paints and his skill at observing and representing animals, birds and plants of Sydney Cove and Norfolk Island that Governor Hunter copied his paintings in his sketchbook Birds & Flowers of NSW.

When I decided to celebrate my birthday in the National Library of Australia, I wasn’t thinking of George Raper. I was planning to spend the morning with Ellis Rowan’s wonderful flower paintings. The day before I travelled to Canberra, I rang casually to ask if I could also see Raper’s painting of the Sydney rock orchid (Dendrobium speciosum).

“Oh no! ” they said. “His paintings are too important. Too fragile. Too unique”

“Well, maybe,” they said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Two days later, I was absorbing Ellis Rowan’s painting of Sturt’s Desert Pea in the Manuscript Room. I had a case containing ten of her paintings on the table in front of me. Someone came up behind me and said “Are you Meg? Ten o’clock or two o’clock?”

And that was how I was offered ten minutes with George Raper.

I was overwhelmed to the point of unaccustomed and inexplicable tears at the thought of time with something so precious. Two guardians wheeled his large black case to the table and slid it off the trolley. Reverentially, they unclasped the lid and began, with four hands, to move the mounts to avoid buckle or bend. Through the cover sheet I could see the faintest tantalising outline of paintings that weren’t the orchid. However, I accepted that my ration was one.

And then, the guardians relented and lifted the veil on the Glossy Black Cockatoo. I was stunned by the brightness of the colours. I’d seen the cockatoo before, but in pallid digital form. The spears of the burrawang behind him gleamed dark green. The glimpse was brief, but special: Glossy Black Cockatoo is my online avatar.

No more glimpses were vouchsafed until we reached Dendrobium speciosum. The cover sheet was removed, the guardians stepped back  and I was sitting down in front of a a flower painted in Sydney Cove 220 years ago. I had ten precious minutes to breathe it in.

The digital version, used here with the permission of the National Library of Australia, had done nothing to prepare me for the original.

I felt the urgency of looking well. I began with the paper to settle my excitement. It was woven and cream, with slight spots of foxing and a mysterious pencil annotation Can – no. No one seems to know what this signifies.

Raper didn’t begin his painting with a background wash. His approach was business like: the plant and just the plant.

I began with the pseudobulb. It perches on the rock (or log), minute hairs protruding finely from the base. The bulb is rich pink and yellow with fine lines and the clearly marked criss-crossed casing for the leaves. The leaves form a deep bright green ribbed chalice with a rim of gold as they curve around the racemes. Little scrapes of paint escape from the outline of one of the leaves.

The artist manages the crowding of the creamy yellow flowers skilfully. Mostly they are in profile and on these his maroon spots are sometimes a bit slapdash and the flowers are contained by a slightly unsteady outline. But in the two blooms that look directly at the viewer the orchid characteristics are portrayed with detail and exactitude.

Once I had looked my fill, I began trying to imagine the young man in the sparse settlement of 1789, painting, with precision and grace, portraits of things new to him.  He is sitting with his paper on his knee, or a makeshift table, his precious watercolours beside him and his eyes scouring the specimen, just as my eyes are scouring his painting. Maybe my two first fleet ancestors notice him as they go about their convict business.

The guardians seem to have stretched my ten minutes, so I return to the painting and experiment with another way of looking. I begin at the bottom and breathe in what I see and then close my eyes to reproduce it for my memory. Slowly I move up the painting: the bulb, the leaves, the flower sprays.

I sense movement beyond my concentration and the guardians flank me again. The careful putting away begins: four hands, muted voices; the cover paper, the mount; the sliding. But there’s another treat. A faintly limned bird calls through its veil, the veil is lifted, and we have a brief glimpse of the Common bronzewing, richly coloured with hints of gold to catch the pigeon gleam, and in the background a xanthorrhea.

I stand watching every move, until the clasp on the black case is closed and it slides back onto the trolley.

For more information about George Raper

Linda Groom First Fleet Artist: George Raper’s Birds & Plants of Australia National Library of Australia 2009

The George Raper Collection

George Raper watercolours

Rock lilies or Sydney rock orchids: Dendrobium speciosum (or is it Thelychiton speciosus?)

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Arthur Boyd, August to October, Bald Rock NP, Bournda NP, Brogo Dam, Bundanon, Dendrobium speciosum, Ellis Rowan, George Raper, Joseph Lycett, lithophytes, Margaret Preston, Thelychiton speciosus

Wherever there are rocks, rock lilies seem to appear. My first sighting was from a canoe on Brogo Dam about fifteen years ago, before my love affair with orchids began. There they were, creamy white against a sheer cliff face which dripped with moss and moisture. I had no idea what they were but I knew they were beautiful.

I encountered them again years later on a high ridge in the bush west of Bodalla. Leathery leaves on sheer rock face, much drier this time, and yes! there were flowers.  Of course, as survivors they had put themselves out of reach on a steep cliff. But they made themselves known, and us hungry for more.

So we returned a week later, now a bit familiar with their habit and habitat, and took a bet on another ridge in the neighbourhood. We walked up a gentle slope through the reddish-orange trunks of angophera, and there they were – pseudobulbs, those thick stems typical of rock orchids, and racemes loaded with buds and occasional flower, all within easy reach of eyes and camera.

This was the beginning of a trek through treasures. The whole of that ridge was alive with rock orchids. Sometimes we needed to scramble and contort for the perfect view.

I managed climbs and balances I would not have believed myself capable of. I wanted to see and smell and take photos and  peer down throats and delight in the maroon freckling and breathe in the spicy perfume.

After that visit, I considered myself an apprentice connoisseur of the rock lily. I recognised them immediately in paintings  by Joseph Lycett and felt inordinately proud, given my usual poor recognition skills.

I found rock lilies many times over the years: on the rockface as I walked down the rock staircase into the rainforest patch around the lagoon at Bournda National Park in southern NSW;

on the tors called the Two Sisters as I drove along the highway between Bodalla and Narooma;

and as I walked through the bush to the top of Bald Rock in granite country in northern NSW.

When I visited Arthur Boyd’s studio at Bundanon with an old friend and fellow orchid afficianado we saw his painting The amphitheatre still hanging on the wall. A white snake slithers down the rock face,  cropped trees lean every which way and rock lilies bloom. (The painting is reproduced here with the permission of Bundanon Trust.)

After a picnic under old European trees near the house, we strolled up the track towards the amphitheatre, detouring to visit a hut set in the middle of a slashed paddock. A snake slid out of the grass, an omen of orchids we hoped.

The amphitheatre was a grand place. The rock walls towered above us and the trees leaned in just as they did in Boyd’s painting.

There were great clusters of rock lilies everywhere.

Boyd and Lycett weren’t the only artists drawn to the rock lily. George Raper, a midshipman on the Sirius in the First Fleet, painted a watercolour of the rock lily, probably in 1789.

Ellis Rowan, that most wonderful of flower painters, also captured rock lilies in watercolour

and Margaret Preston celebrated them in a series of woodcuts.

Having seen such a luxuriance of rock lilies in the wild and out of the tip of the artist’s paintbrush and knife, it was an anti- climax to discover them cultivated in a manicured front yard in Oak Flats, and in amputated sprays on the table at a family celebration.

Addendum: As I was preparing this blog I discovered that the rock lily has undergone a name change. In David Jones’ Field guide (2000) it is Dendrobium speciosum. By his 2006 Complete Guide it has undergone a taxonomic segregation from Dendrobium and become Thelychiton speciosus. It is also known as both Sydney rock orchid and rock lily.

Acknowledgements:

The National Library of Australia gave me permission to include

Ellis Rowan: Rock lily (Dendrobium speciosum) nla.pican 6723370

George Raper: Dendrobium (Rock lily) vn3579494

Thanks to my fellow orchid tragic for finding the Lycett images for me and for drawing my attention to George Raper.

Midget Greenhood: Pterostylis mutica

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Bingara, glaciation rocks, Pterostylis mutica

We frequently travel north to Queensland by non-direct routes, over a number of days. One of these meanders takes us to the glaciation rocks just off the Narrabri to Bingara road. We usually camp down by the river with the music of rapids and frogs to lull us. However, last time heavy rain made this impossible, so we found a flat place on rocks above the gorge which was roaring with floodwaters and foam.

On a morning stroll, I spotted a solitary orchid beside the dirt track. I marked it with a discarded beer-can and a fallen branch and went back triumphantly to fetch J. And you know what, despite the markers, I couldn’t find it. Further evidence that my orchid spotting skills are appallingly limited.

This is what we finally refound …

My rank amateur status as an identifier was confirmed. I didn’t even recognise it as a member of the vast greenhood alliance, and many leafings through David Jones’ big book didn’t help. Then I struck it lucky in his field guide. It’s Pterostylis mutica.

True to experience, once we’d seen this solitary orchid, they began to pop up everywhere. Our rocky camp-site was alive with them.

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Tongue orchid or thumbnail orchid: Dockrillia linguiformis

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casuarinas, Dockrillia linguiformis, Tuross River

At the beginning of October we visited a patch of grand old casuarinas beside the river. On a dead fallen one, very close to the river bank we found four patches of distinctive thick fleshy leaves with very noticeable parallel furrows.

We’ve been visiting these leaves for a few weeks, not very hopeful of flowering, since they are quite exposed. However, orchids again proved themselves to be tough customers capable of unexpected survival and there were sprays of buds visible from the ground.

Some of them were flowering, but as is the way of things one really wants to photograph they were a bit inaccessible.

We spent a long time peering into the casuarinas further from the river, without spotting more orchids, although they must be there (that’s the orchid spotter’s refrain!)

A week later we visited again, this time with an extension ladder and three cameras. Our eccentricity was rewarded.

Obituary: Waxlips and Sun orchids

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Country energy, destruction

A week after finding waxlips and sun orchids on a rocky, mossy, grassy slope I went back to deepen my acquaintance.

I found the whole steep hillside unmercifully slashed. There was no grass, no orchids and very little moss. Even the rocks had been semi-obliterated. All that remained were the monstrous tyre marks of the Country Energy tractor. The destruction was so totally complete that there was no room left for any reaction but stunned silence.

Waxlip orchid: Glossodia major

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Eurobodalla, Glossodia major, Lake Brunderee, leeches, October 2011

Neighbours mentioned seeing orchids close to home a few weeks ago. I failed to find them. However, we embarked on another ramble on 1st October. This time we explored a mossy, rocky bank close to the road. It was seeping with recent rain and offered a tangle of grass and moss and trigger plants. While I was trying to capture the detail of the trigger plant flowers, my companion prowled off up the slope. I heard him say “When you’ve finished, there’s something here I want to show you.”

It was a splendid mauvey-purply-bluey orchid, about 5 cm from dorsal sepal to the tip of the lateral sepals. Three more modest companions were close by.

The search for ID began when we returned home. We finally satisfied ourselves that it was a Glossodia major, and swore again that we’d master the naming of parts. Jones told us that the pollinators are small native bees.

We listed things crucial for final ID to look at on a visit the next day: the leaf, long and wide, was hidden amongst baby eucalypts and grass. In this photo the stem has a kink in it close to the ground.

and the detail in the throat: the yellow calli, the white and mauve labellum (a modified petal) and the purple column (the style and staminal filaments).

We’d been waiting for four or five years to spot another Glossodia. We came across our first ones in the early days of orchid spotting, beside the track and in the bush towards Lake Brunderee near Potato Point. The habitat was completely different: dry and open.

Even the discovery of a very fat leech on my leg and the appalling itchiness for the next few days didn’t diminish my pleasure in this find.

Tongue orchids: Cryptostylis leptochila

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Bodalla State Forest, Cryptostylis leptochila, pollination by wasp

I like tongue orchids. They announce their presence by very distinctive leaves – a maroon underside – although fallen eucalypt leaves often cause confusion.

 

One of our local colonies in Bodalla State Forest shares a hillside with greenhoods and caladenia, one of those slightly ruined hillsides that undermine the notion of orchids as delicate plants. The colony on J’s block is far more attractive to wildlife and rarely reaches flowering.

I monitor those leaves obsessively one year and am rewarded by a number of patches of tongue orchids in full flower.

It’s not until I watch David Attenborough’s The private life of plants that I become interested in the pollination of orchids. In the case of a tongue orchid, pollination requires sophisticated deception. The male wasp Lissopimpla excelsa has to be convinced to the point of copulation that the labellum of the orchid is a female wasp. Jones assures me that this is easily observable on warm days.

Some excellent photos, unfortunately taken by someone else!