orchids in Leutratal

I begin this post with a warning - it contains some truly terrible photographs of flowers. I'm not really that good at (or interested in) photography, and I take pictures for the sole purpose of adding some imagery to this chronicle of our activities for the sake of our far-away families. So if you're going to get all annoyed with how the picture is really focussed on the grass behind the orchid, stop reading now. Okay, now that that's out of the way I can continue with the post.

Last Saturday I went with Calin and Susanne to Leutratal, a valley by the village Leutra, just south of Jena, by the Autobahn (A4). There's a conservation area there due to the preponderance of orchids in the region, and in May and June they offer tours twice a day on the weekends to see the flowers. We opted for the 2:00 tour on Sunday, which was a lucky choice, as I'll explain in a moment.

We ended up seeing lots of orchids, at least 10 varieties, though not all are blooming just yet. (I'd like to go back in June to see what I can find then, and maybe even in August when Jeremi's back to catch the few late bloomers.) There were so many people on the tour that we split into two groups, and headed around the loop in different directions. Incidentally, one of our guides was an acquaintance of ours from the English Stammtisch that we go to sometimes on Monday nights. Jena's a pretty small place, really.

We started at the edge of an open meadow, which was filled with a variety of flowers, including the lovely purple orchids you can see here surrounding the dead branch.Here's a close-up of one of the lighter-coloured ones:I thought I might be able to remember some of the names or figure them out from the blooming calendar, but that'll take me forever, so I'll just tell you what I can remember. I think this one is called Purpurknabenkraut in German (Orchis pupurea), and they said that the lighter coloured ones were purer, and that the darker coloured ones were hybrids. (I don't think that there was an Aryan subtext to this, as they also said that the darker ones were prettier...)

After enjoying the view in the meadow, we headed into the forest, where we saw this small, mostly green orchid:and another small one, which doesn't have any chlorophyll. This is called Vogel-Nestwurz in German (Neottia nidus-avis), and it relies upon ants to distribute the pollen rather than flying insects.This one is called Weißes Waldvöglein in German (literally "little white forest bird", or Cephalanthera damasonium) because apparently when it blooms it looks like a bird. Right now it's just leaves really. (It's in the middle of the frame, if you're not sure which leaves to look at.)Then we were walking out by the edge of the meadow again, where we saw this crazy thing:Check out those crazy spiralling petals! This one was called Bocks-Riemenzunge ("Bock's strap tongue", or Himantoglossum hircinum), and smelled kind of skunky. This got Susanne and I talking about evolution, and how some of these plants are so highly adapted to attract pollinators - what on earth is this adapted for? Perhaps it's going to end up on the losing end of natural selection. Unlike this one, which tricks the males into not only spreading along its pollen, but actually gets them to mate with it.I blew this picture up so you could see the flowers better - they really do look like insects. This one's called Fliegen-Ragwurz ("Fly" something or other, or Ophrys insectifera). Apparently they also have pheremones that smell just like female flies ready to mate, but in the species of fly that acts as the pollinator the males hatch three weeks before the females, so they spend three weeks having sex with flowers instead. Or something like that - remember that this was all in German, and next to the Autobahn, so not always so easy to hear. Calin helped a lot with translations. :)Here's another picture of the crazy tongue one, next to I think another species of white one, but I don't remember ...One last orchid - I think this one is Weißes Waldhyazinthe (white forest hyacinth, or Plantanthera bifolia). I'm sorry that I don't know any of the common names in English, but this is what happens when you go on nature tours in Germany. Later in the season there should be a European version of the lady's slipper blooming, which they said was the prettiest one. It's yellow and brownish-purple, and while it looks pretty nice in the pictures, it's got nothing on the lovely pink lady's slippers in the Maritimes. (The German name for the European one is Europäischer Frauenschuh, which means "European woman's shoe".)
There was also an interesting explanation of why there are orchids in Jena, most of which are native to the Mediterranean region. It seems that the seeds were brought over the alps along with grapevines, as Jena was a wine-growing city back in the day. (Actually, until not all that long ago, but there was a major blight that killed off much of the grapevines in Europe in the 1860s, and at this point it was no longer such a big part of the economy here, so grape-growing wasn't re-established with new root stock as it was in the rest of Europe.) These orchids are picky though, and they won't grow unless there's a certain kind of fungus growing in the soil, which just happens to be abundant in the Leutratal. Also, they need quite a warm climate, and again our local valleys accommodate with sheltered and sun-warmed limestone, making Jena the second or third warmest city in Germany, depending on whose climatology you believe. In any case, this combination of factors led to the happy accident that orchids are growing here at all, in an entirely unnatural place. (They even mow the meadows every few years to keep the trees down so that the orchids can thrive, and this is in a conservation area. Ahh, European wilderness is funny sometimes. Beautiful, but still funny.)

There were other flowers blooming as well - here's a wild white poppy:
And Jeremi in New Brunswick is worrying about frost dates and moon cycles, wondering when it's safe to plant poppies for the wedding, and in Germany they're already blooming in the wild! (Oriental poppies are also blooming in gardens here now - spring really is at least a few months earlier here.)

We ended the tour back in Leutra, a charming little town where there is an unusual number of farm animals in people's yards, mostly chickens and sheep. We actually stopped when approaching the town as there was a lamb on the wrong side of the fence running by the side of the road, very anxious to get back in with the other sheep, but luckily he found his way back in without us. (He didn't heed my advice to run for the predator-free hills while he had the chance.)

The sheep in the picture below was also rather unhappy, and tied up all alone by someone's garden. I'm hoping it was just temporary, because she seemed pretty unhappy about it. I took the picture because I was shocked by how long her tail was. You can sort of see it by her legs in this picture.
Here you can't really see the tail, but you can see Susanne and the sheep communing. She really seemed to like Susanne, for some reason.

And finally, the reason we were lucky to have decided to go on this particular tour on this weekend on Sunday at 2:00 - because at 3:00 the Leutra Orchideefest started, which involved a fantastic brass band, the ubiquitous grill with bratwurst and Rostbrätl (like a pork chop on a bun) and beer, and local women selling trays of homemade cake. Naturally we had to stop to taste the goods. You can also see a bowling game set up in the foreground, with boards laid out on the pavement for really wide lanes, and then they had more boards set up for a hand-operated ball return at the other end. There was also information from the nature conservancy organization, with a table set up to teach people about beavers. It seems that there haven't been beavers on the Saale for many years, but just this year two swam up from Saxon-Anhalt and have set up home. While I was worried that they'd dam up the meager Saale and flood downtown, I found out that it's a different species of beaver here than in Canada, the Eurasian version, and they're a bit smaller and not quite as hard-working when it comes to altering the landscape. Now I can sleep at night!