The woods are not as drab now as one might think.
As I walk through hardwood forests this time of year (as I did last week in the Island Ford unit of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area), I’m always struck by the many flashes of floral greenery hugging the otherwise brown forest floor.
The greenery includes Christmas ferns, pipsissiwa (wintergreen) and running cedar. But one of my most favorite — and one of the most interesting — green plants of the forest floor in winter is the crane-fly orchid, which has a delightful scientific name, Tipularia discolor.
The Georgia Botanical Society liked the genus name so much that it titled its scientific journal Tipularia. The species name, discolor, comes from one of the plant’s most intriguing traits — each leaf’s upper surface is dull green with dark bumps, but the underside is a striking, glossy purple.
I love to walk with unitiated folks in the woods during winter and point out a crane-fly orchid’s single oval-shaped green leaf, and then flip it over to reveal the purple underside — and hear my companions’ “oohs and ahs.”
In early spring, however, the crane-fly orchid’s leaf (each plant produces a single leaf) completely disappears. The plant then sends up a 1- to 2-foot-tall skinny stalk on which 20-40 tiny greenish flowers appear from July through September. The blooms often are nearly translucent, making the plant barely noticeable. (The flowers resemble the crane fly; hence the plant’s common name.)
Night-flying moths visit the flowers, whose pollen sticks to the moths’ eyes and gets deposited on the next crane-fly orchid that the insects visit.
In late September, the flowers and stalks quickly wither away; the plant’s leaf reemerges and again adds a bit of greenery to the forest floor through winter.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: One of the year’s best meteor showers, the Geminid, will peak Sunday night at about 50 meteors per hour. Best viewing: in the northeast sky after midnight. The moon will be new on Monday. Venus, low in the east, rises just before dawn; it will appear near the moon on Sunday. Mars is high in the east around sunset. Jupiter and Saturn are low in the southwest after dark. They will appear near the moon on Wednesday night as they head toward a once-in-a-lifetime conjunction on Dec. 21.
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