Montane Leafy Greenhood at Uriarra Village, ACT
Identification history
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Significant sighting
MichaelMulvaney noted:
15 Oct 2015
A new recorded location for an orchid for which there are less than ten recorded locations in the ACT, thanks Ken
User's notes
First three images each from a different plant
6 comments
TonyWood
wrote:
16 Oct 2015
Not easy to separate this B. umbrinus and B. montanus. Some of the plants found in the Brindabellas seem intermediate between the two species.
TobiasHayashi
wrote:
17 Oct 2015
At a risk of reviving a similar debate from a little while back, this looks more like B. montanus to me than B umbrinus...
TonyWood
wrote:
17 Oct 2015
I'm happy to call this B. montanus, given the location. Concerning the earlier debate I sought DLJ's view but got no response. Just to confuse things further, it was once called B. melagrammus.
KenT
wrote:
17 Oct 2015
I have added a couple of extra images which may or may not help in determining this species. Unfortunately I have no useful key to the Pterostylis group and without an ability to compare with type specimens or vouchered collections I’m having to rely on the descriptions and illustrations presented in the ‘Field guide to the orchids of the ACT’. The time of flowering of early to mid-October, its presence among grasses on a road cutting verge that looked like it was cut into a krasnozem soil, the thin leaves (about 3 mm) and the overall shape and colouration of the labellum had me favouring Bunochilus umbrinus. However, I’m not an orchid person I find the level of variability within a species, the seemingly sometimes arbitrary ways of distinguishing between species too confusing and I’m happy to leave that to you guys with the decades of experience with this difficult group of plants.
TonyWood
wrote:
18 Oct 2015
Originally all the local material was called Pterostylis longifolia or P. aff. longifolia. Then the plants at lower altitudes (Black Mountain etc) was descibed as a new species, Bunochilus umbrinus. Material found at higher elevations (eg Tidbinbilla, Brindabellas) was for a time called B. melagrammus before being renamed as B. montanus. To add confusion, Jones made reference to an earlier flowering variant of B. montanus which he thought was probably an undescribed species. But never mind, names may change but the plants stay the same.
TobiasHayashi
wrote:
20 Oct 2015
Hi Ken, fairly confident this is montanus, or perhaps more likely aff montanus (whether or not they are different, who knows), and I've changed the ID to reflect this. The variability as you say, coupled with the diversity, can be quite hard to untangle. B. umbrinus have larger flowers with fatter lateral sepals. The labellum is relatively narrower with less of an obvious ridge at the top. Leaf size tends to vary a lot I find, and flowering time is getting earlier than it was back in the day (apparently). Plus, as Tony mentioned, there is a spring flowering Bunochilus in the Brindabellas.
Location information
- Maps Namadgi National Park
- Places Uriarra Village, ACT
Sighting information
- 4 Abundance
- KenT Recorded by
-
Collections
Significant Plants Orchids KenT Canberra & Southern Tablelands NatureMapr
Species information
- Bunochilus montanus (ACT) = Pterostylis jonesii (NSW) Scientific name
- Montane Leafy Greenhood Common name
- Sensitive
- Rare or uncommon native
- Non-invasive or negligible
- 216 images trained Machine learning
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In flower
- External link More information
-
Synonyms
Pterostylis montana Pterostylis jonesii Bunochilus montanus
Record quality
- Images or audio
- More than one media file
- Verified by an expert moderator
- Nearby sighting(s) of same species
- GPS evidence of location
- Description
- Additional attributes
