Preferred Habitat - Peat-bogs and swamps.
Flowering Season - July-August.
Distribution - Northeastern United States and eastern Canada to
Newfoundland.

One who selfishly imagines that all the floral beauty of the
earth was created for man's sole delight will wonder why a flower
so exquisitely beautiful as this dainty little orchid should be
hidden in inaccessible peat-bogs, where overshoes and tempers get
lost with deplorable frequency, and the water-snake and bittern
mock at man's intrusion of their realm by the ease with which
they move away from him. Not for man, but for the bee, the moth,
and the butterfly, are orchids where they are and what they are.
The white-fringed orchis grows in watery places that it may more
easily manufacture nectar, and protect itself from crawling
pilferers; its flowers are clustered on a spike, their lips are
fringed, they have been given fragrance and a snowy-white color
that they may effectually advertise their sweets on whose removal
by an insect benefactor that will carry pollen from flower to
flower as he feeds depends their chance of producing fertile
seed. It is probable the flower is white that night-flying moths
may see it shine in the gloaming. From the length and slenderness
of its spur it is doubtless adapted to the sphinx moth.

At the entrance to the nectary, two sticky disks stand on guard,
ready to fasten themselves to the eyes of the first moth that
inserts his tongue; and he finds on withdrawing his head that two
pollen-masses attached to these disks have been removed with
them. This plastering over of insects' eyes by the orchids might
be serious business, indeed, were not the lepidoptera gifted with