White Fringed Bog Orchid

 

The lovely white fringed bog orchid is blooming in the New Jersey pine barrens now.

I found a little group of them last Thursday. They were just as the poet, Joseph Pullman Porter, said they would be in his poem Wild Orchids: "Under the pines near a murmuring brook..." Click to enlarge.

To celebrate the sighting, a poem by Wendell Berry, from Given Poems, Sabbath II:

"I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends 

nothing, but only knows 

where the rarest wildflowers 

are blooming, and who goes, 

and finds that he is smiling 

not of his own will."