A Passel of Pink Lady Slippers

Pink Lady Slipper Orchids (Cypripedium acaule)

Last  summer when I was poking about in the woods at the site I had visited with VNPS where we found the native Yellow-Fringed Orchids, I had seen some other leaves and a seed pod that looked as if they might be Pink Lady Slipper Orchids, and decided to come back the following spring to verify my find.

After two weeks of plentiful rain, I figured this would be the right blooming time for slipper orchids, so last Sunday I went back to Fort Valley to look for them. With the leaves just emerging and the woods more open, it wasn't hard to locate the area. Lo and behold, here was a huge patch of Pink Lady Slippers in bloom--I counted twenty-seven open flowers with a twenty-eighth one just fading!

Pink Lady Slipper Orchids (Cypripedium acaule)

About twenty feet upstream from this colony I found another three or four flowers--it's amazing how these orchids manage to hide so well in plain sight! I hope these patches flourish for many years, but  I think this particular year may be a rarity--somehow I doubt so many orchids flower at the same time every year. I plan to return next year to check just in case.

Close-up of the flower

In the close-up you can see the pollinia (pollen sac) just behind the staminode (the flap-like triangle at the opening of the slipper).

After such an exciting find, anything would be an anticlimax, but since I had never driven any farther into Fort Valley, I decided to drive on to the small town that takes its name from the valley: a small community of farms in a beautiful setting bounded by mountains.

Farms in Fort Valley

Yellow Fringed and Other Orchids in Fort Valley

Yellow Fringed Orchid (Platanthera ciliaris).

A month after the VNPS walk in Fort Valley I returned to see how the Yellow Fringed Orchids were doing. This lovely native is high on my list of plants to illustrate for the year, and it's great to not have to travel far to gather visual material for my sketches.

It was a very hot and humid afternoon, and I was glad to enter the shady forest cover. I recognized the first orchid I spotted as the one I'd seen in bud a month earlier, but the spike of this specimen was not in the best condition: small, with some of the flowers blighted. I looked around for more and found several others growing by the small pond.

The buds were showing color, but the flowers weren't open yet, so I looked further afield. Some ten feet beyond the first orchid I saw another deeper in the woods with its flowers open--a much more appealing specimen. As I was skirting around the undergrowth to reach it, I happened to look down, and right by my feet, the distinctive leaves of another orchid appeared.

                                    Leaves and flower stalk of Pink Lady Slipper orchids (Cypripedium acaule) with Indian Cucumber plant (five leaflets) to the right.

Some of the plants had a couple of old flowering stalks (the flowers long past), and by the shape of the leaves, could be none other than the Pink Lady Slipper orchid--what a great find! I'll make it a point to return next spring to check out the blooms. Prospecting around I found a few more plants, as well as another type of native orchid, the Rattlesnake Plantain, named for the distinctive markings of its leaves.

Rattlesnake Plantain orchid (Goodyera pubescens)

There were several of these, one with a tiny emerging flowering spike and another with a large dried seed spike. These other two orchids had not been mentioned during our plant walk a month earlier. I wondered if the VNPS folks didn't know about these other natives growing here, or if they preferred to keep the locations secret, since these are rare species, as is the Yellow Fringed Orchid. I feel so lucky to live near to these unusual and fascinating plants that provide inspiration for my paintings. There's so much here in Virginia for a botanical illustrator!