The lone Blue Jay Barrens Yellow Lady’s Slipper Orchid sent
up two stalks this year and managed to produce three full blooms.
It’s hard to consider a population as being stable when
there is just a single individual involved.
As in the past, I’ve been searching to discover another of this species
somewhere on the property. No luck so
far.
This plant manages to send up at least one flowering stalk
each year. Unfortunately, it seems a
normal occurrence for disaster to befall the plant before it can develop a seed
pod. The flowers and top of plant have
been eaten on several occasions, a large limb fell and crushed the single
flower that developed that year, a strange wilting disease shriveled up the
flowers another year. It always seems to
be something. This year it was a
particularly violent wind storm.
This flower lost its slipper completely.
A neatly storm cleaved slipper makes it easy to view the interior
pattern.
Only one of the three flowers was unscathed. So far, the plants have only had to contend
with a single disaster per year. Though
that doesn’t mean they are now really safe.
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