Finally I am finding the time to show all the other orchids I found, most of them growing on the Heisslände ('Hot Lands') of Lobau:
As you can see, hawthorn finally is beginning to open its buds, but we're still a few days off all hawthorns flowering in full there on the 'Hot Lands'.
One of the more exotic orchids are the Ragwurzen, as they are called in German, or genus Ophrys. These do not offer nectar as a reward for insects pollinating them; they offer something more exotic: sex. The flowers of genus Ophrys are in appearance fake sexual partners for insects which are stimulated by the flowers to try and copulate with them, and in doing so they pollinate the plant. Each Ophrys species therefore (obviously) is imitating a particular insect. And if you do not see a great resemblance between the flowers that follow then don't be too worried: the resemblance seems to exist for the insects, and this type of pollination trick seems to have worked perfectly for millenia.
Here you can find an update to the sexual habits of ophrys species; I don't edit this post so that everyone reading this finally sees that I am far from being perfect.
Now, at first there's a spider ophrys, probably Ophrys araneola or Ophrys sphegodes (or both of them, as these two seem to be not quite identical):
Now this one could be a bee ophrys, Ophrys apifera, even though it fits not quite the descriptions I found on the world wide web (anyway, it is certainly different from the spider ophrys):
And the next one, when I compared it with the one on Felix Wesch's homepage, I took for Orchis militaris (Helmknabenkraut, Military Orchid) but Felix advised me that it is a simple Orchis morio (Kleines Knabenkraut, Green-winged Orchid) - they sometimes come in different colours, as he told me, this is not so special an occurence. He was also a little bit puzzled by my 'not-quite-bee-ophrys'. (By the way, by now I've also found and correctly identified O. militaris; photos will follow soon here on the blog, with some other orchids mixed in.) [An additional observation concerning the 'not-quite-bee-ophrys': according to literature I've now consulted it may occur that spider ophrys show slight pink colours as this one of mine which - except for the pink - really looks like spider ophrys. So this one really should be nothing but a pink variety of spider ophrys.]
Interestingly, in Northern Ireland Orchis morio only flowers in june according to this site which is at least a month and a half after they appeared this year in Vienna: it comes as quite a surprise to me that vegetation cycles are so vastly different between the mild, oceanic climate of Ireland and the dryer, colder and semi-continental (pannonic) climate of Vienna. Very well, so here it comes, the lilac O. morio:
And with this one I had no idea at all until Felix told me that it's a white Orchis morio, nothing very special really:
