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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
Entry from field notes dated June 29, 2023, taken along roadside roadcut atop ridge forested largely of low-growing Quercus laeta, ridge rising on the southwestern side of Curva de la Doctorcilla, which is near km 18 on the branch road beginning at El Campamento and continuing to El Doctor, and which is numbered Hwy 120, though it branches off the main Hwy 120 running between San Juan del Río and Jalpan; limestone bedrock; elevation ~2930m (~9600 ft), Querétaro, MÉXICO, (N20.85971°, W99.60541°)
LARGEFLOWER CRESTED CORALROOT
The above shows the most surprising and disconcerting find of my week of camping in the area around El Doctor, every day looking for interesting finds. Clearly it's an orchid, just beginning to flower. I knew that probably it produced leaves and green, bulbous enlargements, or pseudobulbs, at the leaf bases, but they grew beneath a dense, continually wandering-livestock-pruned Southern False Serviceberry bush, as seen in the photo, and it would have taken a major, and destructive, effort to expose them. Besides, the flowers were so distinctive that surely the plant would be easy to identify. Also, the orchid and serviceberry occupied a pile of limestone tallus below a roadcut, and in such a disturbed habitat, surely it was a common, "weedy" species.
Only the lowest flower in the raceme was fully open, so this was the very beginning of its flowering period. Each flower and flower bud was subtended by a conspicuous scale, or bract, with pale, thin edges.
Typical of many orchid species, the flower's corolla produced three sepals and three petals. In this species all sepals and petals are fleshy and rose colored, and the sepals are slightly narrower than the petals. The lower petal is modified into a "lip," or labellum. In this species, the lip was three-lobed, the side lobes expanded into winglike appendages helping direct the pollinator toward the nectar.
The lip's white blotch attracts the pollinator's attention to the right spot, and the two ridge-like nectar guides further direct the visitor. The curved, petal-like appendage directly above the lip is the column, which is the orchid family's unique reproductive structure. This flower's petal-like column is tipped with a U-shaped, pale yellow anther, which produces packets of pollen destined to be transferred by pollinators. Unseen on the column below the anther is the stigma, which is a shallow, sticky cavity which receives pollen from other flowers; it's where fertilization takes place.
I had problems identifying this species. It took Mexican orchid expert Ethian Licona via iNaturalst to recognize this as BLETIA MEXICANA, sometimes known as the Largeflower Crested Coralroot. One reason is that the species wasn't known until first published in 2020, so literature available before that time is mute on it. The species is distributed from southwestern Texas to our general area in central Mexico.