Winter Orchids in the Mansfield Shire
I often think of orchids as spring and summer flowering, when wildflowers seem to be everywhere you look. But as I learn more I discover that is not the case. Right now an interesting orchid group is putting on a show. The greenhoods are flowering, and if you know where to look, they're well worth seeking out on your next bushwalk.
Recently, in remnant vegetation around Boorolite, walkers came across two greenhood species in real abundance: the tall greenhood and the nodding greenhood. The tall greenhood, Pterostylis longifolia, lives up to its name with a slender flowering spike that can stand well above the surrounding ground cover, its leafy stem carrying a run of green and white striped hooded flowers. The nodding greenhood, Pterostylis nutans, is a different character altogether, with a single translucent flower that droops forward on its stem.
Greenhoods spread vegetatively as well as by seed, so they're naturally gregarious plants and tend to turn up in colonies rather than as scattered individuals. The abundance at Boorolite is a good demonstration of that habit, and a reminder of just how much is quietly going on in our local bushland if we take the time to look properly.
Greenhoods aren't particularly eye catching. Their flowers are mostly green, white and brown, and their form is more curious than showy, hoods, hairy lips and odd little sepals that curl and taper in ways that seem almost insect-like. They're easy to walk straight past, and even easier to overlook once you do notice something, since their colouring blends so well with the grasses, leaf litter and low ground flora they grow among.
Now I know that orchid season in Australia doesn't begin and end with spring. Different species come into flower right across the calendar, and greenhoods are very much a cool-season group, doing much of their growing and flowering through autumn and winter before dying back as the weather warms. So while the bush might look dormant at this time of year, there's a layer of activity happening close to the ground.
The Mansfield Shire is home to at least ten different greenhood species, each with its own quirks of size, colour and flowering time, and greenhoods as a group are considerably more diverse again across the country, with at least 239 species throughout Australia.
If you do come across a greenhood, or any other bit of interesting flora or fauna, on your travels, it's well worth snapping a photo and uploading it to iNaturalist. It's a free app and website where anyone can record sightings, and a community of naturalists and experts helps confirm identifications, which is genuinely useful for a group like greenhoods where the differences between species can be subtle. Beyond helping you put a name to what you've found, those records feed into a broader picture of where different species are turning up and how they're faring over time, so a casual photo on a bushwalk can end up contributing to real conservation knowledge.
