Habitat & Endangerment

The showy lady’s slipper love basic, neutral soils. Its natural habitat is a fen where water moving through constantly and is typically alkaline (slightly basic with a pH between 7 and 8). In New Hampshire, there are less than 5 locations where this plant is thriving in the wild. This is why it is considered critically endangered.

Flowering Plant

The showy lady’s slipper is a beautiful flower and a flagship of endangered flowers of the world. The showy slipper has large leaves alternating up its stem and often has two stunning flowers on each plant. Often the two flowers emerge at different times.  The picture on the left was taken in mid June, one blossom is just opening to reveal its fuchsia pouch. As the flower opens, the interior petals are more exposed.

Plants are categorized by their flower structures. The showy lady’s slipper is a trap flower. The flower has a large vertical white sepal (which is actually two sepals fused together), two white side petals, a bold fuchsia pouch, and another white sepal hidden behind the pouch. The pouch is an evolved petal that traps insects and helps pollination. Above the pouch in the center of the flower is a yellow spotted structure called the staminode.

The staminode hides the male anthers and the female stigma and helps prevent self-pollination. Each anther has a mass of brown sticky pollen. The developing seedpod or ovary is attached behind where the fused sepal and the petals meet.

The whole showy lady’s slipper plant is pubescent (covered with hairs). There is a chemical at the end of the hair that is released when touched that can cause skin irritation. The picture on the right shows the hair structure under the microscope. We took this picture from the specimens that we preserved and mounted on microscope slides.

Pollination

The showy lady’s slipper is a trap flower. Its bold fuchsia pouch traps insects and helps pollination. Inside the pouch are many hairs that guide the pollinator first past the stigma then past the anthers, where it will pick up pollen to deposit on the next flower. This helps ensure cross-pollination. Although this pollination process has been observed and published in print, our recording is the first video to our knowledge.

In the wild, less than 20% of the flowers produce seedpods. To ensure that we have a sufficient supply of seeds, we manually cross-pollinate the flowers in the spring using toothpicks to pick up pollen from one plant to move to the next. About 25% to 30% of the artificially pollinated flowers produced seedpods.

picture Gallery of showy lady’s slipper pollinators native to New England.

Seedpod & Seed

The mature showy lady’s slipper’s seedpod is about 2.5 cm long and 1 cm in diameter.  It contains around 200,000 seeds that are about one sixteenth of an inch long.  The pod will dehisce (split open) and release its seeds from around late September to early October.  The seeds can be blown miles by the wind.  Only 1% of the seeds will germinate and less than 1% of those will reach maturity.

Seedling

Once a seed has germinated, it is considered a seedling. A seedling has a rhizome that is an underground stem located where the root meets the shoot. The rhizome stores starch to provide the energy to put up the next year’s new shoots, which will grow the new leaves. With each successive year, the plant will produce more shoots from the rhizome.

It is more common for showy lady's slippers to reproduce by rhizomes, similar to strawberry plants. When lady’s slippers become established in a place, they can survive for over 100 years. In these locations they will reproduce non-sexually (not from seed) by rhizomes. Because of this, scientists believe that seeds are the plant’s backup-plan in case their current habitat declines.

In the wild, it takes 8 to 10 years for a showy lady’s slipper’s seed to grow into a flowering plant.