Flora of North America species comparison

The green links below add additional plants to the comparison table. Blue links lead to other Web sites.
enable glossary links

Habenaria repens

floating orchid, habenaria acuática, water orchid, water-spider orchid, waterspider bog orchid, waterspider false reinorchid
Habit Plants terrestrial or semiaquatic, erect to decumbent, 10–90 cm.
Leaves

scattered along stem and gradually reduced to sheathing bracts;

blade ascending, linear-lanceolate to lanceolate, narrowly elliptic, or oblanceolate, 3–25 × 1–4.5 cm.
Inflorescences

floral bracts spreading to ascending, lanceolate, 15–90 × 5–12 mm.
Flowers

ascending, not showy;

sepals 3–7 × 3–4 mm;

dorsal sepal shallowly concave;

lateral sepals reflexed-spreading;

petals greenish, lamina ascending, falcate, 3–7 × 1 mm, lateral lobe arcuately spreading-ascending, filiform, slightly to markedly exceeding petal;

lip greenish, middle lobe descending, linear, 4–7 × 1 mm, lateral lobes ascending-spreading, filiform, 5–11 mm;

spur slenderly cylindric to scarcely club-shaped, 0.8–1.4 cm;

ovaries 9–15 mm.
Capsules

on short pedicel, nearly erect, 8–15 × 3–7 mm,

Habenaria repens
Phenology Flowering primarily summer–fall, sporadically (Apr–Dec).
Habitat Marshes, wet meadows, bogs, margins of streams, ditches, and ponds, commonly an emergent aquatic in shallow water and in floating mats alone or with other vegetation
Elevation 0–100 m (0–300 ft)
Distribution
from FNA
AL; AR; FL; GA; LA; MS; NC; OK; SC; TX; Mexico; Central America; South America; West Indies
[WildflowerSearch map]
[BONAP county map]
Discussion

Habenaria repens is remarkable in sometimes being truly aquatic. Often forming floating mats, the plants then are commonly decumbent, at least basally, and new shoots and slender roots arise abundantly from much of the length of the stem. A few spheroid tuberoids are sometimes produced from roots arising at wide intervals. Other roots bear new shoots some decimeters from the parent stem; the distal portion of the root then commonly enlarges into a slenderly lance-fusiform tuberoid.

(Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.)
Source FNA vol. 26, p. 582.
Parent taxa Orchidaceae > subfam. Orchidoideae > tribe Orchideae > subtribe Habenariinae > Habenaria
Sibling taxa
H. distans, H. odontopetala, H. quinqueseta
Synonyms H. nuttallii
Name authority Nuttall: Gen. N. Amer. Pl. 2: 190. (1818)
Web links 
Unless otherwise noted, all data comes from the online version of the Flora of North America, who have made most of their content available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).



Type/paste one or more Latin names into the boxes above; matching taxa will show up below the box as you type. You can use the up/down arrow keys to move through the list.

(If the plant you're looking for doesn't show up in the auto-complete list, that means it either isn't described in Flora of North America yet, or it's listed under a synonym. And please note that Flora of North America is still missing several plant families, including Fabaceae, Apiaceae, Boraginaceae, and Polemoniaceae.)

Choose a data source: Flora of North America

The species comparison tool is brought to you by:
Northwest Wildflowers