Fragile Beauty

If you are seeking something to worry about, choose fairyslippers.

Yes, the flowers.  Calypso, in scientific terminology.

Though distributed in circumboreal fashion (in a band of boreal forests circling the Earth), fairyslippers are considered endangered.  A member of the orchid family, they are small and equally as finicky and fragile as they are beautiful.

From the very start, fairyslippers have a tenuous grip on life.  They have but a single leaf.  They also require a specific fungus in the soil in order to survive.  A cool and moist environment is another must.  Finally—because fairyslippers possess no nectar, they attract pollinates by deception.  Their vanilla scent and shape fools pollinators who land on the flowers and bumble around without gain just long enough to get the job of pollination done.

A fairyslipper plant, under the best of conditions, will last no more than five years.  They do not tolerate pulling, trampling, or transplanting.  More alarming, fairyslippers do not endure logging or any other such wholesale disturbance of habitat.      

My cabin property boasts a fairly large population of fairyslippers.  Having learned more about them, I guard them jealously.

If you find fairyslippers in your travels, talk nice to them, but leave them be.

Posted are a couple of (surprisingly sharp) photographs of fairyslippers I captured with my new smarter-than-my-phone on a recent trip to my cabin.

--Mitchell Hegman