The elusive Lady’s Slipper
It was 40 years ago, June 1980, my first year in the Ozarks. One new botanist friend whom I accompanied that summer on his search for rare plants was the late Richard H. Davis (1946-1983), a field ecologist for the Nature Conservancy under contract with the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. He was particularly interested in rediscovering old locations for rare plants, recorded on herbarium specimens, but not seen for decades.
On one trip we rediscovered the location for the rare endemic yellow echinacea (Echinacea paradoxa var. paradoxa) in Stone County. Another excursion took us on a search for the historic location for the most southwestern known population of showy lady’s slipper Cypripedium reginae.
This lady’s slipper species, the largest and most spectacular native indigenous North American orchid, is up to 3 feet tall. It is Minnesota’s state flower.
We were looking for it at the edge of its range. We hiked up a creek bed to the historical location and searched forest and bluff faces high and low, zigzagging up the creek, spending the better part of a day. Imprinted in my memory that day was a face-to-face, one-foot, eye-level encounter with a coiled cottonmouth ready to react to my next move.
After many hours, we had not seen that for which we had come — the showy lady’s slipper. Disappointed we headed back downstream. Alluding our careful search on the upstream hike, much to our surprise, there it was —the showy lady’s slipper, about ten feet up on a narrow limestone shelf, a small population of four plants.
In the search for rare plants, such moments evoke joyful ecstasy. It’s like meeting an old friend you’ve only read about.
Here in Arkansas, we have three of the 12 North American species of lady’s slippers — the yellow lady’s slipper (two varieties of Cypripedium parviflorum), the small yellow lady’s slipper, and the large yellow lady’s slipper, difficult to distinguish from one another even among botanists.
We have the largest concentration of the 150+ known populations of Kentucky lady’s slipper, Cypripedium kentuckiense, only recognized as a distinct species in 1981. And we have the most southwestern population of the showy lady’s slipper, which most will never see.
If your Covid nature hikes take you to rich woods this time of year, keep an eye out for the reward of seeing a flowering lady’s slipper orchid. It could be a new discovery.