Showy Lady Slipper (Cypripedium reginae)The Showy Lady Slipper is the rarest native orchid of them all, a wild incandescent creature of wet woodland, ferny bog and spruce-fringed marsh. It is a species which takes its own sweet time in finding a home, settling into its new home slowly and only conveying its special gifts to intrepid wild wanderers of soggy summer places some years later. The orchids here are at least sixteen years old, and they may be much older - once a Showy Lady Slipper finds its chosen place to stand, it spends the first sixteen years of its life becoming acquainted with its surroundings and putting down an extensive healthy root system before budding out and blooming for the first time. It is not unusual for colonies of Showy Lady Slippers to be fifty years old, and botanists suspect that mature colonies may be well over a century in age.
These exquisite orchids may not be here with us on this plane for much longer. As their preferred habitats are drained, landscaped, paved and replaced by subdivisions, golf courses, highways, casinos and office buildings, they are slowly disappearing from the landscape, and they are now classified as an endangered species. I plan to keep my colony of Showy Lady Slippers a deep dark boggy secret.
At some time during the wee hours of Sunday morning, the hen turkey's eggs hatched, and she led her children away and up into the oak groves where they will be safer from the predators of air and field. Happy times, and I wish her well in her mothering endeavours, but I am going to miss her soft greeting on weekend mornings.
10 comments:
Gorgeous! And well worth your hazardous decent! Thanks!
Gorgeous! And well worth your hazardous decent! Thanks!
Thank you so much for sharing these rare beauties with us. Beautiful!!
oh wow, what an amazing sight. well worth the gorge trek!
I'll bet you just floated up out of that ravine! What a treat! My 80 year old mother has some secret ones in Muskoka. How many are there in your spot?
I love these rare plants. I did not know that they preferred a bog as the ones I was lucky enough to come across this spring were on the top of shaded by dry hill.
I counted twenty seven clumps of Showy Lady Slippers in bloom on Sunday morning, and they were all lovely. A little over half of the clumps were on the small side, smaller leaves and smaller blooms (usually two per plant) which meant the plants were young. Almost half were well established clusters and the blooms were huge (three per plant) - we counted 67 blooms in total. I felt very rich that morning (if also very chewed by the insects).
Wowzer! I bow down to you, Wild Woman. These are exquisite.
I had commented yesterday about being surprised that these ladyslippers grow in such a wet area. The ones I found were high and dry. I guess for some reason my comment arrived somewhere else. Oh well.
My colony of Showy Lady Slippers was blooming in a particularly nasty deer fly infested bog at the bottom of a gorge, and all the ones I have seen here are in wetlands, but I did find a few healthy clumps of Greater Yellow Lady Slippers blooming in dry shaded areas in the woods several weeks ago, which was surprising. I have seen Pink Lady Slippers (Moccasin Flowers) growing in dry shaded areas a few times in past years.
Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of shade where the plants are situated, with the kind of soil they are growing in and what sort of spring we are having in any given year. Good rich partially shaded ground is imperative, and a wet spring is always better - I do know that in dry spring seasons my yellow ones don't bloom at all.
Hm, you have given me something new and interesting to research. . . .
Post a Comment