White Angel

This is one of the old local names for the Greater Butterfly Orchid, Platanthera chlorantha. These spectacular orchids are just coming into flower at the nature reserve, not the many hundreds we saw last year, but enough to brighten any walk, especially late in the day when they seem to glow in the fading light.

Here you see the florets in close-up. You can see the way the long green ovary, between the stem and the flower, twists to turn the flower so its long strap-like lip is hanging down to provide a landing stage for night-flying moths. Only moth species with a very long proboscis will be successful at raiding the nectar, which is found right at the end of the long curved spur at the back of the flower. Those moths that do visit, when the flower spike is standing out at night from the dark vegetation surrounding it (another local name is Night Violet), stand a good chance of picking up one of the sticky pollinia that are positioned precisely to intercept their heads as they probe for nectar. Rather than sticking to the moths' heads, they often stick to their compound eyes which must be quite uncomfortable, but it is a crucial process for the orchid as one of the next flowers to be visited will get pollinated by the club-like pollinia that, by then, will have adjusted position to brush against the stigma. The evolution of this amazing mechanism has given us, perhaps, our most elegant native orchid.