WHITE LADY'S SLIPPER 



Cypripedium candidum Muhl. 



May - June 

 Swamps, prairies, 



along railroad tracks 



There was an Indian village in the distance, 

 a rising dune to the east, and beyond lay 

 Lake Michigan. Between the low dune and 

 the village on higher ground lay the broad 

 expanse of wet prairie which once was so much a part of the landscape 

 around the lake. The wet prairie in the days of the Indians was splendid 

 in spring and siminier with l)rilliant flowers, and in May there came 

 the time of white lady's slippers. They were everywhere on that Caliunet 

 prairie, everywhere for miles, it seemed; their stiff green stalks with 

 the closely-held hairy leaves bore one or two flowers on each ; there were 

 millions of them. 



The white lady's slipper has a small, white, pouch-like flower with 

 green-purple sepals and petals extending outward and over it. Inside 

 the white pouch are purple speckles, and the interior mechanism, like 

 those of the other lady's slippers, admits only certain tiny green bees 

 which for ages have fertilized American lady's slippers. Stiff and ex- 

 quisite on the old prairie, the white lady's slippers blossomed and were 

 gone. And were gone. . . . not for the sunnner, but almost for good. 



Where lady's slippers grew for miles on the Calumet prairie there 

 now are steel mills and factories, dirty streets and dirty houses, and air 

 thick with smoke and fumes. It is far from the sweet peace of the wet 

 prairie where white orchids bloomed. But tliis species apparently has 

 suffered less extermination than the other lady's slippers in Illinois, 

 for there still are many places where the conditions are right, often 

 along railroad embankments and ditches, where a few white lady's 

 slippers still blossom as part of the })icture of late spring. 



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