Stalking the Elusive Orchid: Florida Boasts the Flower’s Greatest – yet Endangered – Diversity
Photo by Jason Matthew Walker
The ”birder of orchids,” Roger Hammer displays a photograph at his home in Homestead of him and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Roger was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award from the Dade Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society in 1982. This work is licensed under CC BY–NC–ND with minor edits for style. – Editor
It was September 1975. Roger Hammer packed his camera, six canteens of water, two compasses, an Army jungle hammock, dried fruit, beef jerky, and other light rations before he headed to the Everglades in his Volkswagen van.
He drove 90 miles from his home in Homestead to Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, home to 50 native orchid species. That’s about half of Florida’s orchid diversity and a fourth of the species in the U.S. and Canada.
But Roger, then 32, was looking for just one: Lepanthopsis melanantha, the tiny orchid.
”There it is!”
He had read about it, but few if any botanists had seen firsthand the flower’s delicate purple-red blooms. They are extremely rare, found primarily in hard-to-access recesses of the swamp, he recalls reading.
He parked his van, stepped outside, and proceeded to hike for five days. Along the way, he stumbled across 30 orchid species. Trudging through a swamp is tiring, it turns out, so Roger took a seat on a pop ash tree stump to rest and enjoy a granola bar. As he munched, he looked over his shoulder, and like a ghost, there it was: a tiny orchid with tiny burgundy petals.
“I went, ‘Oh my god. There it is,’” he remembers.
Chasing Orchids
Roger, now 79, has continued to spend much of his time chasing down and photographing the state’s most elusive flora. Florida alone boasts the greatest diversity of orchids in the continental U.S., but today, three-fourths of its orchids are listed as endangered or threatened. Humans and their insatiable poaching appetite for the rare flowers are putting Florida’s last remaining species at unprecedented risk, and climate change is only making matters worse, as are sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, heat waves, and urban sprawl.
But Roger has done much more for the orchids than take their beauty shots and publish them across more than eight guidebooks.
