Yellow Lady-slipper (Cypripedium pubescens) Click browser's <Back> button to return to prior page.

This is a sad story.  This Yellow Lady-slipper (Cypripedium pubescens) was one of hundreds of lady-slippers at an incredible remote site in northern Vermont.   You used to be able to walk into the mature woodland tract in early June and look out over the site to see hundreds of golden-yellow slippers popping up amid balsam firs, red maples and other understory plants.   I returned to the site ten years after this picture was made, but found not a one plant.   I returned again a couple weeks later but found no lady-slippers.   As so happens, the tract had been sold by a conservation- friendly land-owner to a timbering outfit which couldn't care less about what they destroyed.   All that was left of the beautiful sub-boreal woods were a few sick or immature trees and a thicket of grasses and sedges.