I initially thought Donald “discovered” these uncommon blooms at the cemetery, but I learn through a decades-old Hartford Courant article that he, in his other role as local historian, learned about the orchids from a 1976 book about the cemetery’s Revolutionary War soldiers. The book mentions two sections where the orchids were known to dwell. These days, it seems, we are down to just the one.

I sit and observe from my low seat, trying to adopt a botany lens as Donald might have. Their shape looks alien, different from the limited range of orchids I have seen. One familiar type is the lady’s slipper, which has a look of substance owing to its impressive pink pouch of a flower. The other types I have seen, potted orchids often given as gifts, look simultaneously spare—in the way that bonsais strike an artful and commanding line—and flamboyant, with their colorful and shapely blooms.

These orchids are different. Each plant sports bulbous-looking, rounded projections arranged in a spiky-looking pattern atop a tall, slender stem. Despite the “yellow” in the plant’s common name, these buds are a decided orange. Each specimen has, on the lower flowers of its cluster, feathery-looking projections—the fringed “lips” I read about. The stems have a pinstriped look, and skinny leaves in a lighter green hue hug each of them, pointing toward the sky.

This species likes either partial shade or full sun, and the patch has both criteria covered, according to where you’re sitting. They should be protected from slugs, snails, and cutworms, but is someone watching for these threats now that Donald and Dorothy are gone? These plants can also fall prey to withering, wilting, leaf rot, and the ominous-sounding black spot pathogen. I find this list exhausting and worrisome, and start wondering what else could befall the patch, whose sole guard is a low perimeter of rope. Might hungry deer prance in and consume the whole collection one day?

My gaze wanders across the patch. I watch a black swallowtail butterfly hovering over one orchid. I also spot a large, yellow butterfly—likely an Eastern tiger swallowtail. Butterflies, especially swallowtails, are the primary pollinators of this species.

I don’t see much insect activity beyond these looping visitors, and I’m noticing the same trend in the wider world. A Biological Conservation article says 40 percent of all insect species are declining globally. A third are endangered. This year, I’ve been watching for monarch butterflies, who carry this statistic heavily on their long-distance migrating wings. I jumped with delight to spot just a single monarch recently at a local preserve. I watch our milkweeds at home with anticipation of finding monarch eggs, but I fear our window for seeing the imperiled orange and black visitors may have closed for the year.

Were Donald and Dorothy noticing these changes, too, as they tended the orchids and appreciated the flora—and by association, fauna—here?

Seeking wise words to help me in the face of worry about our warming world, I find some encouragement in an Emergence Magazine interview with Dara McAnulty, an author, naturalist, and conservationist who published Diary of a Young Naturalist when he was just 16:

I feel like that joy we so desperately need is something that we need in order to solve all the crises that are coming in . . . if we solve the problems because of wonder, because of joy, because we care, that’s a lot more permanent . . . I absolutely know that things that give us joy in this world, especially the natural world, are essential for everything.

Even as I mentally build a litany of concerns, joy finds me during my time at Winthrop Cemetery. It radiates out from the cache of orange blooms that drew me here and now calls me to look, listen, touch, and sniff beyond their immediate orbit.

After an hour in the camp chair, I stand, stretch, and look around. I make a loose inventory of the other plants in among the Platanthera, knowing names for some and having no clue about others. Young oaks and maples are starting their lives here, with sweat bees using their leaves as landing strips. I notice some tall, green grasses reminiscent of wheat. I am pleased when, looking to the right, I can recall the name for daisy fleabanes, boasting yellow centers and light purple petals.

I walk and wonder what else I will find. The earth answers with small sassafras trees and spongy clusters of low, white, and frilly lichens—reindeer moss or something akin to it. A tree stump has started a terrarium, with a mixed community of low, flowerless growths in an impressive spectrum of greens. Near it, flat mushrooms that look like perfectly grilled pancakes stand in a trio. Two-foot-tall ferns—ostriches, I think—rise above the masses. Some tiny family of creatures has been skeletonizing many plant leaves, leaving only a fragile network of veins.

Walking on, I enter a welcome state of immersion, reveling in the vast variety of creatures on this modest parcel. I move farther from the patch and its attendant bench, finding roundleaf brier and Virginia creeper in spades. On a sun-warmed leaf, I catch two shimmering Japanese beetles in flagrante delicto.

Swamp milkweeds poke up from a pondside tangle cluttered with ferns and grasses. On the rim of the pond, I see young cattails, their shoots still green and low, alongside “old geezers” who have completely fluffed out. Clover has its usual haphazard run of the lawn.

I watch a small, orange butterfly with brown edges land on plantain, and for a while I follow its restless flight from plant to plant. A stripey green damselfly makes an appearance, alongside a pale beauty moth. Yuccas overtake the eroding stone for someone who died in 1904.

I notice how many gravestones include botanical images—ivy leaves, oak leaves, laurels, whole weeping willows. I also recall how, in early spring, colorful clusters of squat ephemeral flowers wound their way between the markers in the oldest section, echoing a reminder of “here today, gone the next” while simultaneously radiating an infinite beauty.

If I had met Donald and Dorothy here, would they have taught me about the plants as we walked? And if they had, how much would I have retained? I waffle between wanting to collect more knowledge and wanting to simply appreciate what I see, perfectly content to not know the names for each floral creature.

Circling back to the bench, I see that a squirrel must have been enjoying a hickory nut as he perched there, no doubt seeing the orchids as he finished his snack. Did he feel any need to name them?

I sit on the hard granite, taking a moment to thank Donald and Dorothy for their lives. I have found joy and perhaps some beginnings of wisdom in trying to view this place through the botanist perspective I imagine they both favored. Seeing how an array of creatures coexists on even this modest spit of land has made me want to see more, to learn more, and also to protect what is still managing to thrive.

Fascinating as my botanical morning has been, it occurs to me that the life of a botanist, even a very amateur botanist like me, is not easy. I am sweating, mosquitoes are biting me with hungry fervor, and I have to pee. I lose my mood for precise observation not long after these bodily alarms start to cry out in unison. I decide I’ll come back on a cooler day.

Back home, I read that old Courant article, whose title asks, “Why All This Devotion to a Cemetery?” I read about how a troop of volunteers sloshed through thick mud here, in the rain, toting dogwood saplings and generous heaps of bulbs for a day of planting, along with their pitchforks and shovels. A local elder I know, Kathy, was “deep into a huge rhododendron . . . rain dripping off the tip of her nose.” Across the cemetery, a father and his kids picked up sticks near where the father’s dad and grandmother are buried.

In learning about the cemetery’s devotees, I encounter a fresh brand of joy, different from my morning among the plants. It comes from recognizing admirable, bright-faced persistence in my fellow humans, and along with it comes a needed dose of hope. The article recounts how the place had fallen into neglect, and how a women’s club made the overgrown cemetery their ambitious bicentennial project back in the 1970s, hauling out countless truckloads of brush. People donated plants; some men turned a hopelessly mucky area into the now well-defined pond where the cattails thrive. Around that time, one of the cemetery’s directors wrote the book about the soldiers, clearing an unexpected path to the orchids for Donald and Dorothy.

I make it back to Winthrop Cemetery a couple of weeks later, just as a rainy morning starts to clear. Not far from the Norway spruces on the shadier end of the orchid plot, I am delighted to find that a young orchid has breached its enclosure, starting life a few feet away. Someone has hastily fashioned a rope surround, to be sure the lawnmower, or wayward feet, don’t do it in.

I don’t stay quite as long on this visit, but, oh, how this pioneer orchid gives me a dose of anticipation and joy. I like knowing it lives not far from me, a gift in itself but also a living memorial to Donald, Dorothy, and the folks who revived this place, and all the tender care they offered. I know I’ll be back to check on its progress.

Author’s Note: Research and writing were made possible with support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.