Green-Fly Orchid

This basket of green fly orchid and fern has hung under this live oak at work for eight years, prior to that it lived in a former garden of mine. The picture was taken a couple of weeks ago and quite often it has a late season bloom even at this latitude.

The basket is composed of pieces of bark containing orchid and fern, rescued after a storm and placed inside a wire basket with a coco-fiber liner behind the bark. I do not remember what the basket is filled with but I think it was regular potting mix. The fiber has long decomposed and other types of fern have moved in on their own but the orchids continue to grow pretty much uncared for.

The peak bloom is early summer with an occasional spike anytime while the weather is warm. The basket hangs out all year long and the only protection is the canopy of the live oak. It would be hard to find a simpler plant to grow, but it is a hard plant to find or purchase!

While hunting for fallen snags with orchids on them I quickly learned that deer are also fond of collecting it after storms and if I want to find it uneaten I better be willing to go wading in the swamps the day after the storm. It is worth the trials because it rewards you with blooms for very little care.

Swamped Swamp Sunflower

The yellow at the bottom of this pic is the native Swamp Sunflower, or helianthus angustifolius, relaxing at home in a swampy area at Caw Caw Interpretive Center which is a Charleston County Park occupying the site of several old rice plantations. Now for those of you who didn't grow up in Charleston where blue-haired schoolteachers have bored generations of children with the history of rice cultivation: rice growing was a soppy wet business. It involved all these levees and dikes and flooded fields and water flowing hither and yon. When local rice growers finally threw in the scythe in the early 1900's, the abandoned low-lying fields reverted to marshes and swamps. And with a rainfall last weekend of several inches, there was water everywhere.

This stand of Swamp Sunflower was probably on dry-ground ten days ago but being waterlogged seems to have kept it happy.