Lady's Slippers!

This blog is more than recipes... what's in season... our family in the kitchen...what's growing in our yard. This post falls in the latter category. When we first moved to Lincoln, we had a few lady's slippers on our property and our neighbor's woods had over two dozen.  Over the thirty years we have lived here, largely due to being eaten by deer, most of these rare orchids have disappeared. In April of 2003 our woods was severely burned by a forest fire and all the ground cover as well as mid-canopy was destroyed.  Before the fire, we had about four lady's slippers growing under a large birch which miraculously survived the fire. In subsequent years these four returned.  This year, however, in the location where four had been, I found nine, and in another part of our woods I found an additional lady slipper! Considering that lady's slippers do not reproduce easily and have been disappearing in many locations around us, this is a special surprise.

Reviewed 9/14/2017