2007-08-18 Day trip to Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve and the Francis Marion National Forest, SC. I was joined by Ron Parsons (San Francisco, CA) and John Brubaker (Awendaw, SC) on a day trip to check out the fringed orchids and Venus flytraps along the coastal plain of SC. We went to Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, near Conway, SC to show Ron some Venus flytraps in the wild. We did not find them on this trip, but we did find some superb fringed orchids, including a fine hybrid between Platanthera conspicua and Platanthera ciliaris. This hybrid is called Platanthera xlueri (formerly P. xbicolor).

We finished the day trip by returning to the Francis Marion National Forest where we found a few P. cristata (late in the season for this species) and P. ciliaris. The number of fringed orchids have been drastically reduced by the extended drought in the Southeast. Many of those plants we found showed few flowers per stem, or were withered from the couple of weeks of 100+ degree temperatures. However, the search area is so large that we were able to find a few stems with fairly showy flowers.

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