Nearly every season I make the acquaintance of one or more new
flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one
considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like
an herbalist. One likes to have his floral acquaintances come to him
easily and naturally, like his other friends. Some pleasant occasion
should bring you together. You meet in a walk, or touch elbows on a
picnic under a tree, or get acquainted on a fishing or camping-out
expedition. What comes to you in the way of birds or flowers, while
wooing only the large spirit of open-air nature, seems like special
good fortune. At any rate, one does not want to bolt his botany, but
rather to prolong the course. One likes to have something in reserve,
something to be on the lookout for on his walks. I have never yet
found the orchid called calypso, a large, variegated purple and yellow
flower, Gray says, which grows in cold, wet woods and bogs,—very
beautiful and very rare. Calypso, you know, was the nymph who fell
in love with Ulysses and detained him seven years upon her island,
and died of a broken heart after he left her. I have a keen desire to
see her in her floral guise, reigning over some silent bog, or rising
above the moss of some dark glen in the woods, and would gladly be the
Ulysses to be detained at least a few hours by her.
I will describe her by the aid of Gray, so that if any of my readers
come across her they may know what a rarity they have found. She may
be looked for in cold, mossy, boggy places in our northern woods. You
will see a low flower, somewhat like a lady's-slipper, that is, with
an inflated sac-shaped lip; the petals and sepals much alike, rising
and spreading; the color mingled purple and yellow; the stem, or scape,
from three to five inches high, with but one leaf,—that one thin and
slightly heart-shaped, with a stem which starts from a solid bulb. That
is the nymph of our boggy solitudes, waiting to break her heart for any
adventurous hero who may penetrate her domain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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