Disa cooperi long spurs and weird lips

On this Disa cooperi flower spike the flowers angle up from the olive-green erect stalk, although they face down. Each ovary ascends from the stalk, partly enveloped in its green bract. The bracts attenuate to narrowly pointed tips that are soon withered.

The open flowers in picture have white dorsal sepals with purple speckles only on the upper parts of the spurs. Spreading lateral sepals are also white with a dash of green inside their slightly oblique tips.

Those sepals towards the top of the spike still close the faces of the flowers in funny-looking buds with elaborately peaked hats, the spurs that are announcing imminent opening. When the lateral sepals close the face, the lip is hidden inside; being a petal of the inner whorl of corolla segments, it is carried inside the outer whorl of three sepals. 

The flat green lip at the flower base is quite unusual. This is a non-resupinate Disa species that did not twist when young as a bud, but still its lip is below! This evolutionary wonder serves the same purpose as resupination, providing pollinators a convenient landing spot on the lip for its food finding sortie. In the case of this species the plant's genetic endowment saw to it in floral development directly, no twisting. Some other disas, notably D. bodkinii and D. bivalvata from the Western Cape exhibit the same characteristic of patent, spreading or upright lips below with no resupination (Liltved and Johnson, 2012; Manning, 2009; Pooley, 1998; iNaturalist).