in the wet border of a creek. After a few years, the entire 
colony disappeared for unknown reasons, but not before the 
accompanying photograph was taken (Figure 4). In 1982, Clarie 
Frankton found two white-flowered plants among a number of 
normal ones in the southern part of Gatineau Park. 
A quite common, but easily overlooked, example of lack of 
anthocyanin occurs in the Early Coralroot (.Corallorhiza trifi- 
<Ja). The typical variety has small ruby-coloured spots at the 
bases of the lip, lateral petals and column. In addition, the 
tips of the sepals are a light brown that might be mistaken for 
the ageing of the flower. In variety verna, the spots are 
missing and the sepals are a pale greenish-white. Since the 
plants are small and the spots very small, while the cedar swamp 
habitat is often fairly wet and dark, many naturalists avoid wet 
knees and do not check which form they have. The two varieties 
seem to be comparably abundant in the District, although we do 
not have a numerical estimate. This orchid frequently occurs in 
dense clumps perhaps 10 cm in diameter which are all of one 
variety. 
The Spotted Coralroot (Corallorhiza maculata) provides our 
final example of anthocyanin absence. In the common form, the 
colour can be quite variable from one plant to another, as well 
as from one part to another of a single plant. The range can be 
from gold to brown to dark purple. This variability of hue 
suggests, as discussed above, that it has more than one pigment. 
The name of the species arises from the conspicuous, purplish- 
red spots on its otherwise white lip (Figure 5). These spots 
reveal the colour of one of the pigments, the anthocyanin. The 
much rarer form, forma flavida, is a uniform bright yellow 
except for the lip, which is pure white - an unspotted Spotted 
Coralroot (Figure 6). This magnificent plant lacks anthocyanin, 
but because of the second pigment, it is not white. We see that 
this other pigment is a pure yellow. Probably it is a caroten¬ 
oid. We applied a simple chemical procedure called paper chro¬ 
matography to the normal plant and found that indeed it contains 
just these two colours, yellow and purplish-red. 
At a Native Orchid Location Survey meeting a decade ago, 
participants were asked to watch out for colour forms of the 
local orchids including this one, prompting the late Anne Hanes 
to recall a colony in Gatineau Park that she had known since 
1965. We have followed this colony since then. In an area 
about 50 m by 100 m, there may be a dozen normal plants and a 
couple of the yellow form, all widely separated. Some years 
there may be twice as many plants; in other years there may be 
no yellow plants, as in 1986. Over this period, we have never 
seen a plant of the yellow form reappear where one had been 
before. The normal form also does not seem to occur in the same 
place twice, except when there is a dense clump of plants. Then 
the clump may persist for two or three years, although perhaps 
not the same individuals. 
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