Showy lady's slipper, the state flower of Minnesota

How to recognize it

The showy lady’s slipper is a tall native orchid, about 8 to 40 inches high, with hairy stems and several broad, ribbed leaves that clasp the stem. Each stem carries one to three flowers. The most striking part is the lip, an inflated pouch about one to two inches long shaped like a slipper, white washed with pink to deep magenta. Flat white petals and sepals frame it.

The hairs on its stems and leaves can cause skin rashes in sensitive people, so it is best admired without touching.

A slow-growing orchid

Lady’s slippers grow extraordinarily slowly. A plant can take more than 16 years to bloom for the first time, and it can live more than 50 years, slowly spreading into clumps with dozens of stems. Wild plants rarely survive being dug up and moved, though nursery-grown plants are now sold.

Where it grows

The showy lady’s slipper is native to Minnesota. Its range runs from southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan across the Great Lakes to New England and south to Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. It grows in wet, often limy places: calcareous fens, peatlands, swamps and damp roadsides, often with sphagnum moss under tamarack, white cedar, balsam fir and black ash. It has become rare or vanished from much of its southern range, but Minnesota and Michigan still have strong populations.

Where to see it

In June and July, look in fens, bogs and cedar and tamarack swamps, and along some wet roadsides in northern Minnesota, where it can bloom in large clumps. Admire it where it grows: picking or digging it is against the law.

Protected by law

Minnesota law bars distributing wild-collected native orchids without the landowner’s written permission and limits their commercial sale, and the state’s Board of Water and Soil Resources notes that picking or transplanting the state flower from the wild is illegal.

Chosen twice

Minnesota’s lawmakers got the state flower wrong the first time. In 1893 the state Senate picked a lady slipper that does not actually grow wild in Minnesota. A women’s group, the St. Anthony Study Circle, pointed out the mistake, and in 1902 both houses of the legislature passed a resolution naming the pink and white lady slipper instead. The choice became law in 1967.