Butterflies, Blooms, Birds & Bugs

Too bad the focus is off! What beautiful colors to both the orchid blossoms and the foliage. Nice find!

Not always easy wen it is windy.
Nice composition

John, many thanks!!

i really like this. i honestly don't mind the focus here. normally the "classic" photo would indeed have the bloom in focus, but with it being just slightly off focus and the leaves behind and below being sharp, i am drawn to the great leaves and their intricacies that i might not have paid attention to otherwise. if the bloom had been badly out of focus that might not have worked for me, but this is great. (and i'm a sucker for square format...)

Lovely photo, Andy, and lovely blooms! Thank you for participating in Butterflies, Blooms, Birds & Bugs.

Interesting how that slim flecked leafs seem to cling to the steem until the inflorescence develops. I never saw an orchid like this.

Well, the one with the open inflorescence has green leafs and the later blooming flecked ones, yet the form is identical, very slim and lancetty with the leafs by the steem comming from the ground rosette, not somewhere half up. The second from the right seems to become a white one. Perhaps some kind of obscure hybridizing dactylorchids or just a local aberation of something developing differently elsewhere....
I tried my best to help you, even wormed my way through loads of pics at http://www.orquideasibericas.info/ going just by some botanical latin and intuition as my spanish is way to poor for the questionaries, but your fun and distinctive steems they seem to have nowhere. :o(

Andy, "differen variety" in Orchids is often a subject to huge controversies. There are botanists from universities fighting for the taxonomic correctness and what stuff is a subspecies, own species or considered to make up an other genus is often each time different if you look into 3 guidebooks by different authors. Dactylorchis means a huge spectrum with a ot of room for interpretaton that also includes genera like Anacamptis, Androchis and Barlia with the Orchis and the Dactylorhiza, anything prone to hybridize or develop instabile diversions looking close to an other species according to habitat conditions. To say they are probaply of the Dactylochis complex is a great trick making it possible to the educated lay person that can not pic specimen and test them in a lab, to at least limit the ID to a mixed group of prime suspects, regardless if the plants in a lump look all the same or rather different. Of course it can still be wrong. ;o)