Excerpt from The Orchids of New England: A Popular Monograph
The name Orchid is with most persons associated with the heat and luxuriant vegetation of southern climates, and our North American species are, as a rule, known only to botanists. Few in number, terrestrial in their habits, often unobtrusive in color, almost valueless in trade, they make of themselves no claim to distinction in the vast floral tribe to which they belong; and the rambler in wood or field is surprised when told that this or that flower he has brought home is related to the gorgeous and curious plants he has admired in some hot-house. When the Island of Java contains over three hundred species of Orchids, it is but a confession of poverty to state that the section of the United States lying east of the Mississippi and north of North Carolina and Tennessee produces fifty-nine species and varieties; but when this area is narrowed down to New England and forty-seven are found in the catalogue of her flora, the provincial pride that devotes a special treatise to this little group can be easily understood.
My own acquaintance with this rural family was for years what might be called a bowing one; a supposed ability to call its members by name when I saw them and an appreciation of their outward beauty or oddity forming a superficial knowledge with which I was quite content until I began to make a series of sketches of my charming friends.
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