Orchids aren’t just tropical flowers, they also grow in Idaho and Alaska

Wandering through the woods looking for spring flowers a few years ago, I stumbled across a small pinkish-purple flower on a stem no more than eight inches high. I crouched down and inspected it so I could identify it at home. To my surprise, that small flower was an eastern fairy slipper–an orchid.

At the time I had no idea that orchids grew outside the tropics, especially north Idaho. And to my surprise this summer I found an orchid growing in Bettles, Alaska–above the Arctic Circle. There are over 30,000 species of orchids worldwide and over 200 of those species grow wild in North America. Amazingly, twenty-five species even grow in Alaska.

Not all the orchids found in Idaho are as big and showy as the ones in the tropics, but they can be equally impressive. The mountain lady’s slipper was the second orchid I found in north Idaho and I was amazed at its beauty. The flower’s shape reminded me of the pink lady slippers in northern Minnesota that I saw as a kid (back then I didn’t know lady slippers were orchids).

The key to identifying a flower as an orchid is the combination of three sepals and three petals. Sepals are modified leaves on the outer ring of a flower, often the green part at the base of the flower. Orchids tend to have modified sepals that can resemble petals because of their coloration and shape. On the eastern fairy slipper, the sepals are pinkish-purple. On the mountain lady’s slipper the sepals (of which two are fused together) and two petals are copper-colored, long and twisted.

The three petals can be highly modified or even joined together. On the mountain lady’s slipper, the lower petal (also called the lip) forms a pouch that resembles a slipper (hence the name). Of all the orchid’s petals, the lip is generally larger, colored differently, more conspicuously colored, or shaped differently in the form of a lobe, fork, pouch or spur.

One family of orchids characterized by a spurred lip is the rein-orchids. I’ve found an Alaska rein-orchid in north Idaho and didn’t believe it was an orchid at first. The multitude of tiny flowers grew upward along the stem and they seemed too small to be orchids, but they were because of the three sepals and three petals.

Coralroots are another unusual type of orchid because they lack chlorophyll (and the associated green color) and, therefore, are yellow, purple or brownish. Because they lack chlorophyll for food production, coralroots are saprophytic, meaning they derive nutrients from decaying organic matter and the associated soil fungi. This dependency often results in coralroots being abundant in one area of the forest one year and completely absent the next if all the nutrients are gone.

Most orchids in Idaho rely on soil fungi for germination and growth because orchid seeds lack the food reserves found in ordinary seeds. The microscopic seeds rely on the fungi for nutrients but the seeds and plants also need certain soil moisture and sunlight/shade conditions. Because of the specific requirements needed for orchids to survive, finding an orchid can be extremely rewarding, whether in Alaska or Idaho.