54 OUR NATIVE ORCHIDS 



14. RAGGED ORCHIS 



Hahenaria lacera (Alichx.) R. Br. (Plate XXV., Fig. i.) 



These fantastically cut and slashed blossoms that make 

 a greenish-yellow maze on the slender stem of their species 

 deserve a better name than Ragged Orchis. The English 

 writer Sweet calls it the Torn-flowered Hahenaria, and 

 describes it as being "elegantly jagged" in appearance. 



It is a small plant from one to two feet high, bearing 

 leaves that grow smaller as they climb the stem, and a loose 

 spike of flowers from two to six inches long. But the indi- 

 vidual flowers — could any one conceive anything more 

 remarkable than the way in which this lip, not more than an 

 inch long, is cut and slashed and divided ? First it is 

 parted in three main segments, and these again are divided, 

 and notched and slit, till it is hopeless to follow the law of 

 their fashioning. 



Asa Gray thinks that the orchid must be very fascinating 

 to insects, for he says that the pollen masses are generally 

 removed from older flowers and the stigmas fertilised. 

 But Mr. Gibson, in a pencilled note made on this sketch 

 some twenty years ago, when he first began to watch the 

 ways of the orchids, hints that even lesser intelligences than 

 Asa Gray's believed the orchid to be attractive to insects. 

 He writes: "Found also on above, among flowers, a smooth 

 caterpillar, pale green, that had formed a screen of the 

 fringed petals, with meshes of a web exactly counterfeiting 

 the colour and size of the fringe; also a pure white spider 



