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Showy Lady's Slipper

Cypripedinm spectabile. Orchis Family.

Stems.--Downy; two feet high. Leaves.--Large; ovate; pointed; plaited. Flowers.--Large; the three sepals and two lateral petals, white; the lip white, pink in front, much inflated.

My eager hunts for this, the most beautiful of our orchids, have never been crowned with success. But once I saw a fresh cluster of these lovely flowers in a friend's house, and regaled myself with their rich, stately beauty and delicious fragrance. Strangely enough I find no mention of this latter quality either in Gray or in Mr. Baldwin's work on orchids.

Mr. Baldwin describes the lip of this flower as "crimped, shell-shaped, varying from a rich pink-purple blotched with white to pure white." He says that in southern Connecticut it may be found by the 20th of June, but that the White Mountains rarely afford it before July. It is due in the Berkshires, Mass., late in June.

It grows in peat-bogs and its height and foliage strongly suggest the false hellebore.

This flower is one of a species whose life is threatened owing to the oft-lamented ruthlessness of the "flower-picker."

Near Lenox, Mass., there is one locality where the showy lady's slipper can be found. Fortunately, one would suppose, this spot is known only to a few; but as one of the few who possess the secret is a country boy who uproots these plants and sells them by the dozen in Lenox and Pittsfield, the time is not distant when the flower will no longer be found in the shadowy silences of her native haunts, but only, robbed of half her charm, languishing in stiff rows along the garden-path.