It’s midsummer. What better way to use the day off than walk around a bog, in rain, looking for orchids and other plants? Well I couldn’t think of anything better anyway. And I mean that quite seriously!

The result was 7 individuals of early marsh orchid ssp. cruenta and about a dozen of early marsh orchid. You’d think that it’s not a lot and it actually isn’t, not for this large area that we covered. But I think that it’s part of the charm of these excursions, when you finally find one of those rare flowers it’s always a delight. If our bogs and forests were covered with orchids, then there wouldn’t be a need to search. And without searching, there wouldn’t be finding. And without searching and finding… where’s the joy?

What was a little bit surprising is that all the early marsh orchids we found (of either kind), none were blooming yet. The cold weather has slowed down the development considerably, so while in early June it seemed like all the flowers were about a week early, they now seem to be a week late instead.

One orchid that was blooming at its best though was the lesser twayblade (Listera cordata). It’s a very small flower and easy to miss where it’s growing among the grasses and mosses and whatnot in the forest. But once you get your eye trained on it, it seems to be popping up everywhere. The individual flowers are tiny – the stem is about 10-15 cm tall, so those flowers are just a few millimeters.