The Quiet Picture

There’s a couple of good orchid places close to hostel, so it was natural that I would start my morning there. Except, I had a slight disagreement with the book again so I skipped the first one, it just wasn’t worth figuring out why they want to me park all the way over there and then walk back on the road to… whatever obscure point they thought I should take over the barbed wire fence. Anyway, it was considerably more easy to find the second spot, and now I made a new discovery - the early marsh orchid ssp. ochroleuca (Dactylorhiza incarnata ssp. ochroleuca). I was also happy to see more of the marsh helleborine, it really is one beautiful orchid.

After Grodvät, I continued up to the northern tip of the Gotland main island. The wind was really beating the flowers and I had to stretch my patience almost to the limit to get a picture of something that may or may not have been an early marsh orchid. With hindsight, it was. And it was everywhere - I’ve never seen so many. Sadly, not many other orchids to be see, I think I was half blind because of all the purple flowers.

My feet were already starting to get tired, I guess I hadn’t quite recovered from yesterday and I’m a little bit out of shape (or a lot). So I decided that I will only do one more excursion today, and it had to be something that doesn’t require a long hike. Checking my notes, I found a promising spot and sure enough, it produced right away - a serendipity if there ever was one. Already when I got out of the car, I saw two people scanning the ground. So I walked up to them and asked if they had seen anything interesting, they confirmed what I had already noticed myself, it was very dry so the flowers are not so plentiful. As I was talking with them, I saw something bright green in the corner of my eye and we bent down to take a closer look - musk orchid (Herminium monorchis)! It had to be the smallest orchid I had ever seen, must be one of those flowers that are more common than you think because most of the time you just walk right past them without noticing.

I kept walking around the place and found lots of fly orchids and a surprising amount of marsh helleborine. Surprising, because it was bone dry, but this place apparently collects water if there’s a big downpour and then dries up again. Which you could see on the ground, it was dry mud. Just look at the background in the musk orchid picture above, that grey is natural - OOF dry mud.

Then I started having some doubts about the fragrant orchids (Gymnadenia conopsea) I was seeing everywhere. This place also hosts Gymnadenia odoratissima and I couldn’t remember how to tell them apart. So when I saw fragrant orchids that looked a bit different than what I’m used to seeing them, I just simply put my nose to use - I remembered reading that they smell different. And I thought I had found the other species, but then later on when I was reading the orchid book I found out that you can also tell them apart visually and I think I missed it this time. Maybe I came across a hybrid…

Tomorrow will be tough, especially the morning. The wind is really bad at the moment and it will keep up until tomorrow afternoon. And apparently it will also be raining. Not really made for flower photography… or landscapes either, for that matter.

Holiday. Now. I have been sooo tired lately, chronic tiredness that no amount of sleep or coffee can cure. My brain is tired, my body is tired, I even fell asleep on the bus. And I never sleep on the bus (or train or airplane or anything that moves, for that matter). For the past weeks all I’ve been wanting to do is to scream “I don’t care” to everyone who comes asking for anything. I didn’t quite scream, but I think my colleagues heard me say it a few times or many. That week’s holiday I had in May, it didn’t even make a dent. But now I have three weeks (and one day)!

I kicked off my holiday by searching for bog orchids. The book said that they are plentiful on this marsh, so I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to find them. As it turned out, it was. I didn’t find any. Plentiful? That’s just mean. I wasn’t seeing any orchids at all, just a few early coralroot in a forest next to the marsh and nothing else. Until this white thing poked out from the grass. The first white early marsh orchid (Dactylorhiza incarnata) I’ve ever seen! My disappointment at missing out on the bog orchids was immediately swept away. I had a look around but this was the only orchid I could see. A bit later I came across a normal coloured early marsh orchid, and then a bud of the same, but that’s really all I could find.

In the image, I experimented with the foreground. Instead of weeding out everything, I left some grass between the lens and the flower that created a texture around the orchid. I figured it works ok as long as nothing stands out, but I’m not entirely sure if I like it or not.

Dactylorhiza incarnata cruenta

• English: Early Marsh Orchid
• Swedish: Blodnycklar
• Finnish: Punakämmekkä

This is why I drive to the mountains to hunt flowers. To find species that we don’t get around here.. like the early marsh orchid. I have visited the mountains regularly since I moved to Sweden, but I didn’t discover the early marsh orchid until last year, and even then it was pointed out to me. Now I can recognise it with one hand tied behind my back. The other hand I need for turning the leaf to see if it has a dark underside!The funny thing is that I also seem to find some species in the mountains that I can’t find here, even though the distribution map shows that they should grow here. The early marsh orchid is however not one of them, as plentiful as it seems to be in the Härjedalsfjällen region. Or maybe you just need to know where to look…

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Image specs: ISO 100, f5.00, 1/320, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 21mm ext. tube