Orchid trips in Hungary

[SzPeter_hu]

In 2007 I've decided to search for our native orchids to see how they live in their wild habitats. There are about 50 species, though some of these are very restricted. The rarest, if it still exists in our country, is Hammarbya paludosa. Only three flowering specimens of this species were found in 1994, and I have no knowledge of the recent state of the population. The existence of most other species, however, is more certain, and my goal is to find them all. Now it's the third year of the search for orchids, and I managed to see 23 of them in flower.

Looking for orchids in the wild is not only interesting because of our plants of interest. There are many other wonderful flowers and botanical rarities worth seeing. Orchids often choose to grow in exceptional areas where the landscape is also beautiful. I've decided to share my experiences here, and maybe some of you will come and visit our country one day. As my free-time allows, I will continue this thread with pictures and stories of my field trips. Besides orchids, many other interesting things will be included since all these things are part of the habitat of our plants. I hope you will enjoy it.

[Terra_Australis]

Eagerly awaiting your pics

[fred]

Peter,

to my knowledge the last documented Hungarian occurence was in 1998:

Kroel Dulay, G., Barabas, S., Redei, T., and Szurdoki, E. 1998. Uj orchideafaj hazank florajaban, a tozegorchidea (Hammarbya paludosa (L.) O. Kuntze.) Bot. Kozlem. 82(1-2): 35-38.

The species seems to be concentrated around Denmark, with Hungary at the SouthEastern edge of the footprint:

Hammarbya paludosa distribution
Malaxis paludosa distribution

Looking forward to the report !

[SzPeter_hu]

On 25-26th April, 2009 I travelled to the Mecsek mountains in the south-west of Hungary for a two days field trip. The area, which is said to have an almost mediterranean climate, is famous for its flora in every aspects. The southern slopes are dry and receive more sun than average at this latitude. This is the only place where Orchis simia can be found in the country, and I believe that this is the northernmost occurence of this species.

My goal was to visit an area where Dactylorhiza sambucina grows, and to estimate the size of the O simia population. I have seen a few O simia in 2008 but I had no time then to search the area.

After waking up at 4AM and then sitting about 6 hours on train I finally arrived to the starting point. With a short walk I reached the Dactylorhiza habitat, which is a small patch of a dry oak forest on top of a small hill. It is called the "Golden hill" and if you see Dact sambucina flowering there, you will know where the name might have come from. In many populations of D sambucina, as in this one, the red color form is missing and there are only pure yellow flowers.



The forest is a highly protected area, and the table on the right warns that one should not enter without a permission. I was a bit shocked when arrived and saw what happened: a year ago there was no electric line there! Someone cut down the trees right across the protected forest. If any Dacts grew there, now they are gone. Who allowed this? There would have been plenty of place for the electric line elsewhere, the protected area ends about 30-40 meters to the left...

D sambucina is one of the earliest orchids to flower in Hungary and I could only see the last few. Most of them already had developing capsules.



This one is a nice, healthy plant. This is just about how tall they can get, it is not a tall-growing species at all. Visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/encyclia83/ if you want to see more photos.



It was a great joy that I found a single red specimen, though it was quite small. I quickly self-pollinated it in hope of creating more red flowered plants.

After taking at least a hundred photos I continued my trip. I saw a few Orchis purpurea specimens scattered along the road, but there were no great populations. The road went through a peaceful little village. When I was heading to the north, and as soon as I left the last house behind, I entered the forest. I knew that Orchis simia lived around the edge of the village, but I didn't expect to find them so soon. I only walked a few steps into the edge of the forest and I was standing in the middle of a small group. I was almost standing on one of them, so I didn't dare to move my feet until I looked carefully around and counted them all.



The first bigger population was about 100-200 meters away, on the edge of a small clearing in the forest. There are 10 flowering plants under this three, but you can only see them all on the full resolution photo. It was strange to see how choosy these plants are regarding their habitat:none of them grew in the full sun, nor under the full shading of the trees. They grew on the edge between the two, right under the first trees. Furthermore
they only grew at the eastern edge of the clearing, maybe this has to do something with the direction of the sun. Probably they liked warm sunny afternoons. I could not count all of them, but there were at least 25-30 individuals.



This one was the most colorful of them all.



Do you see anything strange on this one? Maybe O simia is the only orchid that opens its flowers beginning from the top. They seem to open very quickly because I had to search a lot until I found a half-open inflorescence to see this strange behavior.



I searched through the forest and found small groups of 2-10 Orchis simia plants everywhere. The biggest group, however, had more than 40 individuals. They all grew in the forest that you see above. I was surprised because this place is very dark compared to the previous habitat that you saw above. More than half of the plants had no inflorescences, but there were groups of 2-3 plants together resulting from vegetative propagation. It seems that they can already produce multiple tubers before they reach flowering size.



The whole area where Orchis simia lives is on the southern slope of a mountain. It's about 1 km long and a few hundred meters wide. After leaving this area I walked for many hours without seeing any orchids. The sun was slowly setting and I was hurrying to reach a village in the middle of the Mecsek mountains, where I was to spend the night. On the road I caught this nice young mouse. Isn't it cute?



To be continued...

[cosmln]

Here in Romania there are some places where the red-pink D.sambucina are quite frequent... i have some photos yellow and red-pink plant side by side.

Also found this year hybrid between O.simia and O.purpurea. Only bad photos... just reached the area after a period of strong wind and rain and all hybrid inflorescence were more or less broken... i think the flower were too heavy for the stem ().

cosmln

[SzPeter_hu]

Sorry for the delay...

The next morning I went to a grassy slope near the village. I saw some yellow flowers there the night before (thought they were D sambucina), but I couldn't identify them in the dark. They turned out to be Orchis pallens. I have only seen 4 plants of this species before, but now there was at least 40!



It seems that Orchis pallens loves cool habitats. This slope is facing to the north. I didn't expect to find orchids there.



Dact sambucina got it's name because it's fragrance should be like that of Sambucus nigra. I never really felt that kind of fragrance on any individuals that I have seen so far. Orchis pallens, however, does smell like S nigra.



There are other interesting plants in the mountains besides orchids. This one is the extremely rare Paeonia banatica. Some say that its's just a subspecies of the more widely distributed Paeonia officinalis. I'm not an expert to make a decision. Here in Hungary Paeonia banatica is accepted as a separate species, and it is endemic to a very small area.



I also visited the half-natural chestnut forest, which is famous for it's orchids. The chestnut trees grow here naturally, not a single one is planted! All other trees were cut down gradually, and so during centuries the chestnut trees took over the area. The sticks in the ground mark where young trees are growing.



Orchis simia should also live in this area, but I couldn't find a single one. There was, however, an impressive group of 20-30 huge O purpurea under an old chestnut tree. Most of them were not fully open yet.



Here's a closer picture to show it's full beauty.

[SzPeter_hu]

Here's a photo from 2008, showing one part of the same O. purpurea group in the chestnut forest. You can see 13 flowring individuals here.

[stephane]

Beautiful! I agree with you, orchids often thrive in places where there is lots lots other plants/wildlife/landscapes that are beautiful, either undisturbed by man or still managed in the "old way".
I love the peonia. I have myself a plant of P. officinalis, and it looks very much like this one. I guess that some authors will report it as a subspecies and other as a real species. That botany...
Continue please!
Stephane

[fred]

Stunning. Looking at the leaves of that one Orchis pallens, it appears they flowered after they were mown ?

[SzPeter_hu]

Exactly, Fred. An I belive that this is the kind of treatment the plants need! Orchids can't compete with grasses, so most ofthen they infest grassy plains when those are regularly cut.

I know an place were there are several such grassy areas (half-abandoned orchards) close to each other on the southern slope of a hill. All these are regularly mown, but there isn't a single orchid in most of these areas. One orchard, however, is thickly covered with Neotinea (Orchis) tridentata and there are a some Anacamptis piramidalis and a few Orchis purpurea also. I used to wonder what is the secret of that particular orchard. I now realise, that it is timing:

-If you mow the area too early in spring, the grass will regrow and cover the orchids when they need light the most. You will also have to mow again before the seeds are scattered.
-If you mow too late, you will also cut the leaves and developing flowers of the orchids so there will be no seed production at all.
-But if you mow at the correct time, when the first orchid leaves have just appeared, you can remove competing grass without making too much damage to the orchid.

At an other location I saw signs of recent burning. The grass was too thick for orchids in parts that the fire did not reach, but it was diffuse at the burnt area. I guess that the area is burn every year. There was a nice colony of Orchis purpurea, showing some damage on the leaf tips. The timing was the sam as in case of the Orchis pallens above. Here are some photos of the area:

[SzPeter_hu]

I'm terribly sorry, I have so many photos but I don't have the time to report all my field trips. But here's a little curiosity that I must show you:

This May I made several field trips to the hills just north of the lake Balaton where I discovered populations of Neotinea ustulata, sometimes mixed with Neotinea tridentata and with Ophrys insectifera in one area. While exploring the area, I became aware of groups of plants growing together in a strange formation which made me puzzled at first. They all looked like this:

[berthold]

[SzPeter_hu]

Nice guess berthold, but no. The fungus needed for germination is found everywhere. Any more guesses?

I give you some help: In all cases that I've seen, the groups of seedlings were at the same distance (11-15 cm) from an older plant. So the phenomenon seems to be in connection with older plants rather than fungi.

[jamesmsss]

How about the flower stem falling over and releasing seed to that spot?

[SzPeter_hu]

That's right! The inflorescence is 10-15 cm high which matches the distance between the mother plant and the seedlings. This is very interesting because the dust-seeds of orchids are usually thought of as weightless specks drifting in the slightest breeze and so traveling great distances. I also read somewhere that rainwater flowing on the ground (on steep hillsides where many these plants live) washes the seed away before finally burying them. But here we have evidence that they simply fell straight down and stayed right there, just as bricks do.

[SzPeter_hu]

After a long break here is the next field trip. Actually this one wasn't in Hungary, but in our neighbor country, Austria, about 60-70 kms from the border. With one exception the species found there are also native to Hungary, so this report will fit in here quite well.

It must be said, however, that Austria has more mountains than our mostly flat country. Many of these mountains are very high, and they have a serious influence on the climate, which is rather cool and wet here. This makes a great difference in the flowering seasons of all plants, including orchids.

As soon as we stepped out of the car, we found a large clump of Neotinea nidus-avis. This species was commonly found in the area, just as it is also common in Hungary. But the flowering season did not match. In Hungary you can usually see this species in full bloom in the first half of May. But there in Austria many of them had still only buds on the 10th of June! I also noticed how strong they were. Probably they like these cool dark pine forests better than the warm oak forests at home, where they usually hide themselves from the sun on northern slopes. One giant specimen had something that I've never seen before: leaves! How foolish it is for a fully mycoheterotrophic plant to produce leaves.



Note that this plant is at least 25-30 cm high and the head of the inflorescence has not yet expanded.

Dactylorhiza maculata was also common along the roadside. This is the most elegant Dact that I have seen so far. I've never found it in Hungary, though. There was also a single white flowered specimen.



Near the road there were grassfields for grazing cows in different stages. One such field still had long grass on it, and we decided to explore it in more detail. Well, it wasn't really "exploring". It was rather running in a zigzag from plant to plant like crazy, shouting "Wow! What's this?" "Quick, look at this!" "No, come here, this is better!". Just as soon as we entered the grassfield, we found many tall elegant pink plants. My friend thought they were Dacts, but I think they were Orchis mascula. It was hard to tell because they were withering heavily. This one was the best of them:



I hardly started taking photos when my friend shouted that he found something else. I stood up, looked at the opposite direction and saw something amazingly big and white. I couldn't decide which direction to go first. Finally my love for Platantheras won, and I went to the white plant. At first it seemed to be Platanthera chlorantha, a species that I've been searching for in vain. It had more leaves than P bifolia, it was higher and more robust altogether and the flowers were also larger. The photos do not give it back properly, but it was really bigger than any Platanthera I've ever seen. A closer examination revealed that the position of the pollinaria was not quite the way I wanted, and my excitement subsided.





Now I believe that it was a hybrid between P chlorantha and P bifolia. The strangest thing was, that there were no other Platantheras anywhere near! I started searching for another (hopefully pure) P chlorantha, but there was none. Also not a single P bifolia in the vicinity! The closest P bifolia colony that we found later was about 500-800 m further.

After this I went to see what my friend had found. There were some Traunsteinera globosa in perfect shape. These were tall and thin plants that swayed with the grass in the wind. They gave me a hard time photographing.





Note the little clubs on the end of each petal and the dorsal sepal, which makes this species easy to recognize. Otherwise the spotted flowers reminded me of Neotinea (Orchis) tridentata, a much smaller species.

It must be noted that soon after the field trip, the grassfield has been mowed and all these plants perished, maybe with the exception of the Orchis mascula that had some chance to produce seeds in time. What a waste!

Higher up on the mountain on rocky roadsides we found huge plants of Ophrys insectifera. At first we got excited, but soon these got so common that they became boring. Many of them were as high as 20-30 cm with 8-10 flowers (not all open at the same time). I remembered my Hungarian trips, where I've been happy if I found 3-4 small O insectifera with 2-5 flowers on each.

Still higher we climbed, and I almost stepped on something. I saw Corallorhiza trifida for the first time. It was interesting because this is a hard-to-find species, but it really isn't a sight to behold. My hand is there to show the size.



There were three of us on this trip: an other orchid enthusiast who knew the area, and a fiend of his, who never saw orchids before were with me. In fact he had no idea at all what made a plant an orchid, and we tried to explain it to him. After a short break I and the other orchid guy started off. The third guy stayed behind and called us back, saying that he found something beautiful. He was actually beginning to test our patience with this, because almost every flower was interesting to him. But he insisted to show us this plant, so we had to go back. I arrived there first, and stood speechless from the shock. My friend needed some time to get back. He was far ahead, as he new there was a Cypripedium colony a few turns on the road above us, and he hurried to see them as if there was a chance of them running away. Finally he also arrived and was quite surprised as well. Our non-orchid friend accidentally found a Cyp calceolus that we did not notice. What a shame! After finding so many little plants hiding in the grass, we went by this magnificent species without noticing it. A quick search in the forest revealed that there were many of them, at leat 20-30 flowering plants and lots of young seedlings.





My friend who knows the Hungarian location of this species told, that our "population" consisted of 2 flowering plants, that still linger on after the poachers dug up the whole area. There were 100-150 plants 15 years ago as he recalls. They were so famous that in the neighboring village a road has been named after them, leading all plant thieves to the exact location, as the road goes right into the forest where they live. The last attempt to save the species was when environmentalists placed little fences around the last remaining specimens to save them from grazing animals. They failed to realize that deer weren't the biggest threat. They might as well have put sings near the plants saying "steal me!". But in Austria things are different. Let's hope these orchids remain secret and safe there for a long time.

I also found one flower with a hoverfly in the pouch. I always doubted the pollination mechanism of Cypripediums. I mean, would any bugs squeeze themselves through the little opening below the anthers when there is a big hole on the top above them? Now I had a chance to find out. I carefully went closer. You know how timid hoverflies are! One bad move and they rush away. I got closer and closer but the fly remained in the pouch. It stayed there even when I held the flower in my hand. Amazing! I found out the secret of the trap: though hoverflies are very acrobatic in the air, they can't fly straight upwards. The highest angle that is possible for them, goes straight towards the edge of the poach. There they hit their backs and wings, and they fall back. How clever Cypripediums are, they put the entrance of the trap to the only direction the hoverfly is not able to move in.

[SzPeter_hu]

I forgot something. I mentioned that there was a single species that is not found in Hungary. After the trip I identified it as Pseudorchis albida. It is an ugly little plant but it had a sweet scent.



This is not an orchid, but I must show it because it's so wonderful:



I returned to the same area 2 months later, and found huge orchids with long thin leaves and tall inflorescences full of green pods. I believe they were Gymnadenia sp, but I must go back next year at a date between the two trips to see them in flower.

Higher up, above the level of the Cypripediums a real botanical wonderland begins. There are no more orchids up there, but strange grasses that look like bromelias, rock-dwelling miniature flowers, Lycopodium species forming huge clumps... I still need to sort out those photos from my second trip. I will post some of them here when it's done if you wish to see them.

[fred]

Excellent !

Never seen Traunsteinera globosa in the wild, I bet I'd have walked by and never taken it for an orchid. Right, I'm going to Austria next year.

That last image (purple non-orchid) is Aquilegia.

I'd love to see the rest of the vegetation!

[stephane]

Hi
This pictures are great and you are lucky to be able to explore such beautiful places. Don't stop posting!
S