Miami Herald Posted o May 16, 2004

Initmate dance among orchids
By Georgia Tasker

Even if you have not slogged into the Big Cypress National Preserve or Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, South Florida's swamps will come alive for you in Wild Love Affair, Essence of Florida's Native Orchids, by Connie Bransilver (Westcliffe Publishers, $40).

A romantic to her toes, Bransilver photographs with passionate resolve the orchids remaining in the wet wilderness. The photos are mostly close-ups, as if Bransilver were trying to wiggle and squirm into the flowers' throats, around and under their sepals and petals, to reveal the spirits hiding there.

Find a penny and hold it face up between thumb and index finger. Look closely at the date. That's the size of Prosthechea pygmaea, the dwarf butterfly orchid, Florida's smallest. To help us understand the diminutive splendor, Bransilver also has taken out a penny and photographed the flower so small it covers just the date. She describes it as ``the Littlest Angel dancing on the head of a pin.''

A picture of the oblong-leaf vanilla orchid, which is found only in Collier County, shows the flower's profile and throws the background out of focus. The effect is ethereal; the flower is ephemeral.

Flowers of wild coco, Eulophia alta, look like three-eared donkeys. Flowers of the cigar orchid, Cyrtopodium punctatum, look robust but their hold on earth is by a thread: Hand pollination by biologists is needed because the bees that used to carry pollen to stigma have disappeared.

Essays also were contributed by Eric Hansen, author of Orchid Fever; Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University; Paul Martin Brown, author of Wild Orchids of Florida; and John Beckner, curator of the Orchid Identification Center at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota.