LITTLE ROCK — Joe Fehrer, manager of Nassawango Nature Preserve on Maryland's Eastern Shore, has set the rules: No photos of the horizon or any landscape feature that might identify this place. No naming the back road that leads to this site.
The obsessive cone of silence around this precise location has nothing to do with nuclear codes or terrorist cells. The mission is to protect a flower. An orchid.
The flower Fehrer is defending is Platanthera x canbyi, or Canby's bog orchid, a rare hybrid born of two rare parent orchids.
This flower hasn't been seen in Maryland in almost 20 years. Fehrer would much rather that the rest of the world take it on faith that this fragile and rare orchid has reappeared on the Eastern Shore. To believe without seeing.
He is taking a reporter to see the orchid only reluctantly, he says, running the risk that the crazy "orchid heads" will find this place, trample the delicate habitat or, worse, haul out a garden trowel, dig up the precious hybrid and steal it away to become a prized possession in some private collection rather than the start of a fledgling colony in the wild.
"They come here and search out rare orchids for their own gratification and remove them," he said. "Which makes them all the more rare. We need to be careful. Some of these folks are real sleuths."
Just past a clump of huckleberry bushes ripe with purple berries, Ron Wilson, a former high school science teacherturned-professional botanist, held his bright yellow globalpositioning device close to his face, the better to read the plot points he recorded a few weeks ago when he discovered the hybrid.
"We're lost?" Fehrer asked.
"It's just I've got so many different overlapping plants," Wilson said. "I'm having trouble reading them all." He paused. "God, I might be stepping on it."
Fehrer jumped onto a tree stump.
Despite cajoling by the preserve's owner, the Nature Conservancy, Fehrer remained so conflicted about publicly announcing Wilson's find that the orchid went in and out of flower while he tried to make up his mind.
Fehrer sent a few blunt emails of objection. Went on vacation. Thought it over. Finally, he relented, on condition that the exact location be kept secret.
Still, by the time Schwedler sent out a news release this month, the hybrid orchid's showy yellow flowers had withered and gone to seed. That made Fehrer happy at the time but now makes it close to impossible to find the orchid in this 25-acre swath of boggy greenery.
"I think it's somewhere over by this colicroot," said Wilson, trudging head down, his white knee socks pulled up over his khaki pants to prevent ticks and other insects from feasting on his legs.
The reason rare orchids and grasses are popping up all over this bog is fire. In May, the Nature Conservancy set the whole area ablaze.
The controlled burn of whathad once been a timber plantation of loblolly pines was designed to mimic the natural cycle of flood or fire that encroaching civilization has thrown out of kilter.
The burn created a wide, open, sunny habitat, bringing to life seeds that had been dormant in the soil for years.
Almost immediately after news of the find broke, Fehrer's phone started ringing. The orchid heads were on the hunt. They just wanted to see it, maybe take a picture, they pleaded. Please, could he just tell them the general area? Fehrer said he was busy, couldn't help them. He hung up.
What Fehrer at this moment does not know is that the orchid heads have already found this rare hybrid, blogging and obsessing about it for days on e-mail lists and in Internet chat rooms. They've even posted a photo that a local orchid head took on a surreptitious visit to the bog.
"It's the rarity factor," said Scott Stewart, a professor of horticulture and a self-described orchid head. "When you find one, it's a little like stumbling across a diamond."
The sky began to cloud over. Sweat broke through Wilson's gray T-shirt as he squatted close to the ground in search of the plant. Suddenly, he stopped.
"Oh my God!" He leaned down and peeked at two thin, unremarkable green stalks with a single slender leaf, no morethan about eight inches high. A deer had most likely come along and chomped the flower and most of the rest of the rare Canby's bog orchid for lunch.
"If I found this today, I wouldn't know it's the hybrid,"Wilson said, shaking his head. "I'd probably have to do DNA analysis."
Joe Fehrer leaned back on his heels and smiled. His secret was safe.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 08/23/2009