+++++++
I have heard about endangered species, but until this moment I have not thought in terms of imperiled ones. I am not certain that this orchid is the one I heard a story about today or not, but I think it is:
| Family: | Orchidaceae (Orchid Family) |
| Common Names: | Canelo Hills ladie’s tresses, Madrean ladies tresses, Madrean ladies’s tresses |
This imperiled plant evidently has a primary custodian: Desert Botanical Garden
AS A FEDERALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES
This orchid is also called a ‘sensitive species’
One of the four locations in Arizona where this plant is known to exist is in the mountains of Cochise County near where I live. Until today I did not know there are native Arizona orchids, so of course I did not know that the very existence of these orchids depends on their relationship to fungi. The seeds of these Ladies Tresses orchids have no food within them as most seeds do. Without the fungi to open up the seeds, the plants cannot be born.
And I certainly did not know that there are rare native orchids in the Arizona mountains that bloom underneath the ground.
++++
When I walked away crying from writing this morning’s post, I knew I had reached a very tender place within myself not far from the deep wounds I carry from 18 years of infant-child abuse I experienced from my mother. I knew I had to be gentle and kind to myself and I knew it was time to come up for air.
So I met my friend at the local laundromat where she was washing her clothes and we sat visiting, eating quiche made there at the small café. My friend told me the story of how a friend of hers went with one of the professors from our small local college on an extremely difficult hike into the nearby mountains looking for buried orchids that bloom underground.
According to my friend, her friend experienced one of the most memorable moments in her life when she was shown exactly where and how to dig to unearth these orchids. The story says the orchids were the color of copper. I didn’t know copper orchids existed, either.
++++
Is an orchid a fragile or a hardy plant? I certainly do not know. But evidently these Arizona orchids are at risk because the environment they have always lived in is changing around them in ways to which they might not be able to continue to adapt to. If they cannot change with the changes happening to their world, they will all die out and become extinct. (Of course this reminds me of tiny infant-children who have to change and adapt within the malevolent environments of trauma they are developing within, or die.)
I have a personal memory concerning orchids. Not real live ones, just a memory of my version of the essence of how orchids and raising orchids seems to me. I think about how we grow up through our early childhood to the point where we begin to have a self that begins to be aware of itself in a body in its life so that it can increasingly have the experience of itself experiencing itself having experiences. This is similar to how I experience my own experience of the essence of orchids, even though in childhood I had no experience of myself experiencing experience at all.
++++
In 1983 when I left my children with my husband and moved to a town 130 miles away to go through an intensive outpatient treatment program for severe child abuse and trauma survivors, I went through a session one day with the primary therapist who owned this treatment center. Steve formed a circle with 15 chairs in the middle of the large room that was used for group therapy sessions. He and I were there alone. Steve asked me to look into myself and experience as many different versions of myself as I felt safe in doing.
Each time I identified a different version of Linda, I moved to another chair in this circle, sat in it, and allowed that version of me to begin to describe its/my experience. At one point I found myself as Captain Nemo. Nemo was a silent, remote, seemingly detached gentleman who shared himself only with the hundreds of varieties of orchids he carefully tended as a hobby when either on land and in his submarine under the sea. As Nemo began to speak, I learned when Nemo first appeared within me as I learned about his love for orchids.
Every time in the past 26 years since that day when I have had an encounter with orchids I have thought about that therapy session and Captain Nemo. But never until today did I ever have the image of what it might be like to climb through rocks along a steep and difficult mountain trail until I found a special place on earth where I might dig down and find a sensitive, imperiled, endangered copper orchid in full bloom underneath the ground.
++++
See: Personal Checklist of the Wild Orchids of North America, north of Mexico
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
North American Native Orchid Journal. June 2007. Revised September 2009 …. Arizona crested coralroot. Hexalectris warnockii. Texas purple-spike forma flavida … copper ladies’-tresses….}
+++++++
Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on
+++++++
Your Page – Readers’ Responses
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stop the Storm 