RHH's photos with the keyword: natural hybrid

If this were founding growing alone it would probably be identified as the Yellow Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium parviflorum, though the pale color of the lip would be confusing. Growing as it does in a mix of plants that include flowers with white lips and dark yellow lips, it is clear that this is the natural hybrid of the white-lipped Mountain Lady's Slipper and the Yellow Lady's Slipper. The Mountain Lady's Slipper is fairly common in Washington, but the Yellow Lady's Slipper is very rare, though common further north in British Columbia. It is likely that none of the plants in this population is a pure species but that they are all hybrids. It is good, though, to find at least some indication that the Yellow Lady's Slipper is still around in the state, though it is classified as endangered. We visited this site on the same day as last year but found very few plants and only a couple still in bloom, though enough to get some decent photos. The early spring and lack of winter snow in the mountains seem to have affected these plants as well as so many others. We'll have to go back next year to see how the population is doing. In the meantime this was our twelfth orchid species of the year.

There are two North American varieties of the Fairy Slipper, The Eastern Fairy Slipper, Calypso bulbosa var. americana, found from the Cascades eastward to the east coast of the USA and Canada, and the Western Fairy Slipper, Calypso bulbosa var. occidentalis, found only west of the Rockies and in the Cascades. The former has a yellow beard and an unspotted lip, the latter a white beard and a spotted lip. The ranges of these two varieties overlap in a narrow area west of the Rockies. Occasionally they hybridize and produce Kostiuk's Hybrid Fairy Slipper with a yellow beard and a spotted lip. We had looked for this hybrid three years running without success, but finally found it this spring, two plants, this and another which was starting to go by. We had two GPS locations and found it at one of those locations and then another flower simply by examining hundreds of blooming plants along the trail we were following. The link to a blog post below has other photos of this hybrid as well as photos of both parents for comparison. On another note, this photo was taken with my new camera, the Canon 7D Mark II, and was in fact among the first photos taken with the camera. The 7D Mark II has features that my old 7D did not have and that camera had been through six years of hard use on trails while hiking and backpacking and had nearly reached the limit of its life. It is now an emergency backup. Though this photo was not taken with that lens, I also purchased (as a package) a new lens, a Canon 18-135mm, IS STM f3.5-5.6 lens to replace what was the junkiest lens Canon ever produced, the 17-85mm IS USM lens, a lens that was in constant need of repair and which Canon has never acknowledged as being poorly engineered, though it has one of the worst records of any Canon lens ever produced.

Platanthera x estesii, Estes Rein Orchis, is a natural hybrid of the white Platanthera dilatata and the green Platanthera stricta. We found this growing with one of the parents near White Dome Geyser in Yellowstone National Park. The spur (not visible), the color of the flowers and the lip all led to this identification, though the green-flowered Platantheras are notoriously difficult to tell apart.

We went a few weeks ago to see one of the few populations of the Yellow Lady's Slipper left in Washington State (they are often dug up and removed and thus there is no location data at all with this picture and not even a hint of its location). We went with the Native Orchid Society and were taken to see the plants by someone who knew of them but swore us to secrecy. When we arrived we were very pleased to discover that the Yellow Lady's Slippers there were Cypripedium parviflorum var. makasin, the Northern Small Yellow Lady's Slipper, but even more interesting was the fact that the population of over 100 plants included plants that appeared to be Cypripedium montanum, the Mountain Lady's Slipper and numerous natural hybrids between the two species, the hybrid known as Cypripedium x columbianum, of which this is an example. The dark sepals and petals could be from either species, but the lip or pouch is the giveaway, it is neither the white pouch of the Mountain Lady's Slipper, nor the yellow pouch of the Yellow Lady's Slipper, but something in between. Another giveaway is the crimson color lining the opening of the pouch which comes from one variety of the Mountain Lady's Slipper but is on a pouch which is not the white pouch of that species. There are pictures of all three on the blog post below: nativeorchidsofthepacificnorthwest.blogspot.com/2013/06/ninth-week-of-native-orchid-season.html Should mention, too, that we've been away for a couple of days. We have an eight year old grandson staying with us and have to keep him entertained, so we went to Mount St. Helen's, the Columbia River Gorge and Multnomah Falls and camped along the way. Managed to get in a bit of orchid hunting as well.