94 OUR NATIVE ORCHIDS 



shy orchid of our cold bogs should find its way by any return- 

 ing traveller to just the sort of damp seclusion that it loves. 

 Moreover, if it had done so, it must have been very long ago,, 

 for v?hen it v?as first discovered by botanists, it was called 

 by a different name, for it varies very slightly from our 

 type, just enough to make it seem that either the Irish or 

 the American climate had caused a slight evolution from the 

 common ancestors of both. Strange marvel, that this small 

 white wand of flowers should point to a half-written page in 

 the world's geological history, and that its mere unconscious 

 presence should illustrate the growth of the slowly shifting 

 continents. 



2. WIDE-LEAVED LADy's-TRESSES 



Gyrostachys plantaginea (Rzff.) Britton. (Plate XXXVIII.) 



The small white Lady's-Tresses, with its broad-bladed^ 

 tapering, clasping leaves, is shorter than any, growing some- 

 times only four inches, never more than ten in height. Its 

 minute quarter-inch blossoms coil around the straight, 

 untwisted stem, and form a very small spike from one to two 

 inches long and not half an inch wide. 



On plucking off a tiny blossom and looking at it with 

 a magnifying glass, it will be seen, as illustrated (Fig. 3), 

 that the bracts are very much shorter than the flowers, and 

 that the petals and velvet sepals are all very narrow and in- 

 curved at the end. The overhanging lip, pale yellow on its 

 face, has a rounded margin wavy and crisped, while at its 



