The Quiet Picture

Time to wrap up this holiday, but I had plenty in store for today. First, I drove to Ramundberget and hiked the 3 km to Klinken. The black vanilla orchid (Gymnanedia nigra, or Nigritella nigra) should be in bloom and I was very curious to see how it was doing this year, last year I had only found four individuals. It was certainly more than four this year – I counted 29! Maybe I counted 2-4 of them twice, maybe I covered a slightly bigger area than last year, maybe they were blooming earlier this year… but whatever way you look at it, the vanilla orchid had multiplied in numbers. What have I said about 2009 being a good orchid year?

After Klinken, I drove to Rockvallen. For two reasons, first, to have a waffle at Knallen, and second, take a look around the marshland because this is normally a good place for orchids and other flowers. For the hike up to Knallen I decided to travel light and left the camera bag in the car, only had the G10 with me. It was such a liberation to be walking without that heavy pack on my back! All my photo excursions would be so much nicer if I could shave off a few kilos from the bag. But it means leaving behind the camera and tripod, which doesn’t make much of a photo excursion… Anyway, I took the shortcut to the Knallen cabin which means that the trail was a bit steep in the end, but the view was magnificent so I was only too happy to stop for a breather so I could take in the sights as well. The hike up there is well worth it, not just for the waffles but really just for the view. 360 degrees of mountains, it’s hard to beat – I can really recommend it if you’re ever around Bruksvallarna!

The marshland starts right from the parking lot, so when I got back down I swapped my hiking boots for wellingtons and G10 for the heavy gear and started zigzagging around the marsh. At a risk of repeating myself, there were plenty of orchids – mostly early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta and fragrant orchids, but also heath spotted and lapland marsh orchids. Seemed like it was a bit early in the season though, I didn’t see much else in bloom yet… or it could also be that I was so blinded by the orchids that I didn’t have eyes for anything else. I have another week of holiday in the middle of July so I will visit Rockvallen again, it’s hard to beat it for ease of access anyway so you don’t have to kill your feet to find the flowers!

This is turning out to be one busy holiday. Day after I came back from Gotland, my sister came for a visit. I had promised to show her my favourite stomping grounds – the mountains. So we drove up, regardless of the weather (raining), did some hiking and came back and did some local sightseeing before she left. Then I just had time to re-pack and took off – to the mountains again!

There are two more orchids that I haven’t yet seen in the Härjedalen mountain region, one is the black vanilla orchid (Nigritella nigra) and the other the alpine chamorchis (Chamorchis alpina). I knew where to find the alpine chamorchis already last year but I failed to spot them. I got a tip for the black vanilla orchid earlier this year, and I knew that they should probably be in bloom now so I headed straight there. The black vanilla orchid grows in open meadows, so when I got to the meadow, I stepped off the trail with the idea that I would zig-zag the area to make sure that I had it completely covered. If there was an orchid in this meadow, I was going to find it! And I did. I hadn’t even come to the first zag when this dark flower stood up from the sunlit grass! I had a look around but this was the only individual I could find. It had just started blooming, so I figured that it’s an early riser because surely it can’t be all alone.

When I had taken the pictures, I started zig-zagging again because I just refused to believe that I had come across the one and only individual of the black vanilla orchid. After a long search, I spotted three more close together, one of them had opened up more than the first I saw and the other two were just buds. So now I had four confirmed individuals, and I hope that there will be more as it looks like this is fairly early for them.

One this same excursion, I found a few strange looking heath spotted orchids (Dactylorhiza maculata). What caught my eye at first was the abnormally dark pattern, and then when I looked closer, I saw the stem covered with spots and there’s some random spots even on the underside of the leaves. Either it’s a very dark and spotty heath spotted orchid, or a hybrid of a sort?