iSizW YUKS. 

 *<OTANICAI. 



TORREYA 



Vol. 27 No. 4 



July-August 



NATIVE ORCHIDS IN AND NEAR NEW YORK 



H. M. Denslow 



At a meeting held recently in the interest of the Wild Flower 

 Preservation Society, it was stated that several species of orchids 

 were found in the vicinity of Inwood on Manhattan Island, 

 sixty years ago; about the time of the beginning of the Torrey 

 Club. Among these were species of Liparis, Spiranthes (two 

 species), Peramium and Corallorrhiza; and the more southern 

 Tipularia. Of this rarer species so few plants were growing in 

 the one little colony, that only one leaf and one flowering scape 

 were collected. This specimen and the other species then 

 collected are now in the Local Herbarium at the New York 

 Botanical Garden. It is not known when Tipularia finally 

 disappeared from Manhattan; but this and other interesting 

 species were exterminated by the advance of what we call 

 civilization. The prolonging of the life of that outpost colony 

 of Tipularia was an early instance of wild flower preservation. 

 Collectors have not always been so considerate of the future; 

 as witness the steady robbing of a bog in Herkimer County of its 

 Orchis rotiindifolia. Ignorance and tillage and commerce have 

 contributed their full share toward the destruction, locally, of 

 large colonies of our native orchids; as of Arethusa in Queens, of 

 Habenaria hlephariglottis in the Bronx, of Tipularia on Staten 

 Island. The need of land for building purposes, a farmer's wish 

 for a new field, grading that eliminated a swamp account for 

 these disappearances — and make us wonder about proportionate 

 values. 



Within the limits of the greater City, in its early years, orchids 

 might still be found; attesting specimens are at hand of the three 

 rose-pink species from within forty years of the present date. 



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