THE ORCHIDS OF NEW ENGLAND. AQ 
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 Linnzus called it Cyprzpe- 
dium boreale; but “its closest relations in this country,” says 
Meehan,* “are perhaps Liparis and Microstylis. Its real rela- 
tionship, however, is with Ccelogyne, 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 Ccelogvne 
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 vite of our gardens, a tree that 
attains considerable size in its native soil, and the black earth 
* Native Flowers and Ferns, II Series. 
