Habitat: terrestrial in moist, open, acidic bogs, prairies, pine woods, and roadsides
Common name: Grass Pink, Tuberous Grass Pink
Blooming: March-August
Comments: in the spring (and into summer in northern regions), these orchids grace the wet boglands with their brilliant pink 1.5-inch (3.75 cm) flowers. The plant consists of a small, whitish subterranen corm giving rise to a single plicate, grass-like leaf (sometimes more than one leaf in var. simpsonii) which clasps basally the flowering stem, capped with one to ten flowers. The flowers use a unique mechanism to achieve pollination. Mid-way up the lip, they bear a tuft of orange-yellow hairs that resembles the pistils and stamens of typical bogland flowers, while the base of the lip is jointed. The pollinators, deceived by this ruse, land on this tuft, their weight triggering the lip to flex downward along its joint and to drop them onto the column arching below. Flower color can occasionally range to light pink or even white.
