THE ORCHIDS OF NEW ENGLAND. 



49 



trees, with which it usually blooms when it does come early, and 

 quite had the start of the Showy Orchis. If any one objects to 

 my opinion that the first week in June is the average time for 

 Calypso in Vermont, he is at liberty to contradict it, but he 

 must convince me that he has gathered the flower more than 

 once. 



In the genus Calypso, and this, our only species, the sepals and 

 petals are tinged with pink ; the whitish column is " broadly 

 winged and petal-like, bearing the lid-like anther just below the 

 apex ;" the slipper, lined with delicate hairs, is purple-pink at 

 the heel, inside and out, shading toward the curiously two- 

 pointed toe into yellowish white. A tuft of bright yellow hairs 

 and dots of purple or pink adorn the instep It recalls the 

 Lady's Slippers very strongly, and Linnaeus called it Cypripe- 

 dium borcale ; but "its closest relations in this country," says 

 Median,* " are perhaps Liparis and Microstylis. Its real rela- 

 tionship, however, is with Coelogyne, a genus inhabiting the 

 warmer parts of the East Indies, and we see by this compari- 

 son how isolated Calypso must be when we learn that instead 

 of a warm sub-tropical climate in which most of the Ccelogyne 

 are found, this one exists only in the extreme north of our 

 country, and Lapland and Russia." He also quotes, in speak- 

 ing of its habitat, a writer in the Gardener s Monthly, who 

 found it in Canada, " on a high limestone ridge . . . sparsely 

 covered with white pines, in holes caused by tearing up of the 

 roots and superincumbent earth when forest trees are up- 

 rooted by storms. The pine needles had collected and decayed 

 in these holes, " forming a rich vegetable mould covering to a 

 depth of 5 or 6 inches the broken fragments of limestone left 

 in the hole." In Vermont there are extensive swamps of 

 the white cedar, the arbor vitae of our gardens, a tree that 

 attains considerable size in its native soil, and the black earth 



* A'ative Flowers and Ferns, II. Series. 



