"70 years elapsed after George Henry Grinnell collected the first specimens in 1923 before... botanists rediscovered its location in 1993...
two U.S. Geological Survey botanists and a colleague at the New York State Museum have identified the orchid as a new species, the Yosemite bog-orchid (Platanthera yosemitensis)... a recent publication in the journal of the California Botanical Society, Madroño. ... Peggy Moore, a USGS plant ecologist in El Portal, Calif.... one of the botanists who identified the orchid. ... Moore and fellow USGS botanist Alison Colwell... had noticed the anomalous distribution in the plant guide Flora of North America of a southern Rockies bog-orchid that was also reported from Yosemite National Park in California. ... Beginning in 2003... Colwell and Moore relocated the site where others had collected the orchid, mapped additional sites where they discovered it growing, and searched several plant collections (herbaria) to examine bog-orchid specimens. ... in consultation with... Charles Sheviak, Curator of Botany at the New York State Museum, they determined the orchid was a new, undescribed species. Sheviak [said]... "I've... have described other new species of Platanthera, so I'm used to being surprised. However, to find such a strikingly distinctive plant in such a well-known locality is truly astonishing. The fact that it appears to be confined to such a small geographic area is furthermore unique among related species." Yosemite bog-orchid is known currently from only nine sites within Yosemite National Park, all on the granitic upland south of Yosemite Valley, between the main stem and the South Fork of the Merced River. As the orchid's range is understood currently, it is the only orchid species endemic to the Sierra Nevada of California. ... tiny flowers... Yosemite bog-orchids have a strong musk component that, according to the authors, has been likened by various observers to a "corral of horses, asafetida, strong cheese, human feet, sweaty clothing, or simply disagreeable."... in the upland area south of Yosemite Valley... This area, largely free of ice during the most recent glacial events in the last two million years, contains at least seven species of plants known only from the central and southern Sierra Nevada" URL : http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1706 ************** Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
