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Part 1. Wild Orchids and the Southern Appalachians
Introduction

Whether on a corsage at some formal occasion or in a display at the local shopping mall, the beauty of orchids is acknowledged by everyone. The enchanting flowers we call orchids are known throughout the world. For most people, however, their name conjures up a vision of exotic rain forests or, at least, steamy greenhouses. Few people realize that there is a marvelous population of wild orchids found outside tropical regions, and even fewer people know that dozens of species grow in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Wild orchids exist worldwide, from the equator to the arctic tundra. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the botanist Carolus Linnaeus was redefining the way botanists would name plants, there were only about 65 species of orchids known to science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the number of named species of native orchids had grown to over 5,000. Today there are estimated to be between 20,000 and 25,000 orchid species worldwide, many of which are yet to be named. And the number is growing. Botanists are still discovering new species, particularly in the widely biodiverse tropic regions. On the North American continent, two new species of orchids have been discovered since 1988 in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and this book describes a new species found by the author in the state of West Virginia in 1996. Altogether, there are in North America, excluding Mexico and the subtropical parts of Florida, approximately 150 species and varieties of native orchids.

This book deals with only a portion of North America, of course--namely, western Virginia and western North Carolina and the eastern regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The crests of the Blue Ridge range define the eastern boundary of the southern Appalachians and become the eastern limit of the range of this book. The ridges of the Allegheny Mountains define the western boundary. The northern boundary of the area covered here can generally be considered as the line drawn by the Potomac River as it descends from northeastern West Virginia, separating Virginia from Maryland. The southern boundary is the line that separates northern Alabama and northern Georgia from southern Tennessee and southwestern North Carolina, approximately 35 degrees north latitude. Within this general area, the county-by-county distribution of each species of orchid discussed in the book is specified on a range map.

Within the boundaries of the area treated in this book is the land between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, which is called the Ridge and Valley Province. In Virginia, this province encompasses the Shenandoah Valley and parts of the James, Roanoke, and New River Valleys of southwest Virginia. This same physiographic region in Tennessee follows the margins of the Tennessee River drainage southwestward between the Great Smoky Mountains to the east and the escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau to the west.

The Cumberland Plateau is a southwestern extension of the Alleghenies and includes parts of eastern Tennessee, southwestern West Virginia, and southeastern Kentucky. In addition to a large number of orchid species typically found in the mountains, several wonderful and special orchids that have affinities with orchids more commonly located in the coastal plain are at home on the Cumberland Plateau.

According to geologists, the Appalachian chain of mountains once extended from the rugged hills of Ireland to the low hills of Texas. After the separation of the continents that began some 200 million years ago and after tens of millions of years of mountain construction and mountain erosion through a parade of changing climates, the Appalachians are presently more clearly represented as existing in two parts. The northern Appalachians begin on the island of Newfoundland and reach southward through New England to the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. At this point, the Appalachians begin to split into two distinct ranges that define the southern Appalachians.