by Mary Reid Barrow
Pretty, small white blooms spiraled round a tall stem as if they were untwirling from a flowery coil somewhere in the greenery in a native plant garden at Westminster-Canterbury on Chesapeake Bay.
“Its narrow leaves were hidden in the growth below,” said resident Janet Pawlukiewicz, who chairs the landscape committee at the retirement community. “I had never seen it before.”
And if anyone should be able to identify the little newcomer, it would be Janet. She had the idea several years ago of turning some of Westminster-Canterbury’s windswept grounds into native plant gardens.
Janet, who also serves on LRNow’s board, snapped this photo. She used her handy phone app, Seek by iNaturalist, to learn that the pretty little bloomer was most probably an orchid called spring ladies-tresses, or Spiranthes vernali.
You might think a sweet spring flower like that would grow in a woodland setting, not the hot seaside gardens at Westminster-Canterbury, but it turns out spring ladies-tresses is one of those orchids that likes a dry sandy climate.
But neither Seek nor anyone else, could explain how the little orchid came to be growing in Westminster-Canterbury’s native plant gardens. Janet has overseen dozens of natives that have been planted there over the past few years, but no human planted spring ladies-tresses, she said.
The scientific name is so descriptive. Spiranthes is a Latin root for the word spiral and vernali is the root word for spring.
Thousands of orchid species of all different shapes and sizes grow round the world but spring ladies-tresses is one of only a few that grow in Hampton Roads.
The lady slipper is another more familiar one, but we often don’t think of it as an orchid. A layperson could not tell an orchid from another type of flower, but a botanist would tell you that the orchid’s reproductive parts are its distinguishing feature.
Whatever bird or critter saw fit to bring the orchid to the gardens, for sure, must have been smart enough to see a welcoming home at Westminster-Canterbury.
