Florida's Native and Naturalized Orchids
An educational photographic site dedicated to our natural treasures
Gallery of Native and Naturalized Orchids
Welcome to the Florida Native Orchids Gallery. This gallery is a labor of love for the orchids native to my home state, Florida (which, translated from Spanish, means "Land of Flowers").
Many years ago, as a young teen, I came across a common violet in the woods, wondering in ignorance if it was an orchid. A quick look through a wildflower book left me disappointed, but a few pages over were illustrations of a few terrestrial orchids (some native to Florida and some not). Within a year of that time, my family had purchased Florida Wild Flowers and Roadside Plants by C. Ritchie Bell and Bryan J. Taylor, and we started to find a few species of orchids nearby-Spiranthes praecox and Cleistes bifaria were our first two native orchids ever seen. To this day, I have a particular soft spot for Cleistes bifaria. Two or three years later, I ran across Carl Luer's book The Native Orchids of Florida in a bookstore, which my parents purchased for me as a birthday present.
Armed with the information in this book, I was able to locate many more native orchids, some growing within just a few hundred feet of where I found the violet growing a few years earlier...it was all a matter of knowing when, where, and what to look for. Over the years, as my family took trips to the beach or elsewhere, and as we went driving through the nearby Apalachicola National Forest, we located many more species, noting locations and blooming times. I have watched these colonies over the years, seeing some colonies grow and thrive and other colonies disappear entirely. The photographs presented on this site are the culmination of all those years of cataloguing these plants and photographing them using state-of-the-art digital technology.
Many of these photographs are available as high-resolution digital stock photographs, as well as frameable high-resolution art-quality photographic prints. Please inquire via e-mail about these options: prem@premdesign.com
The following orchid photographs are available on this site:
Calopogon barbatus (Bearded Grass Pink Orchid, Early Grass Pink Orchid)
Calopogon pallidus (Pale Grass Pink Orchid)
Calopogon tuberosus (Grass Pink Orchid)
Cleistes bifaria (Rosebud Orchid)
Corallorhiza wisteriana (Spring Coral Root Orchid, Wister's Coral Root Orchid)
Dendrophylax lindenii (Ghost Orchid, Frog Orchid, Palm Polly)
Encyclia tampensis (Florida Butterfly Orchid)
Epidendrum magnoliae (syn. Epidendrum conopseum) (Greenfly Orchid)
Habenaria repens (Water Spider Orchid)
Harrisella porrecta (Needleroot Orchid, Jingle Bell Orchid)
Isotria verticillata (Whorled Pogonia Orchid)
Listera australis (Southern Twayblade Orchid)
Platanthera blephariglottis v. conspicua (White Fringed Orchid)
Platanthera chapmanii (Chapman's Fringed Orchid)
Platanthera ciliaris (Orange Fringed Orchid, Yellow Fringed Orchid)
Platanthera cristata (Crested Fringed Orchid)
Platanthera integra (Orange Fringeless Orchid, Bog Torches)
Platanthera nivea (Snowy Orchid)
Pogonia ophioglossoides (Rose Pogonia Orchid)
Pteroglossaspis pottsii (Potts' Orchid)
Sacoila lanceolata (Scarlet Ladies Tresses Orchid)
Spiranthes praecox (Grass-leaved Ladies Tresses Orchid)
Spiranthes vernalis (Spring Ladies Tresses Orchid)
Tipularia discolor (Cranefly Orchid)