Mostly Moseying

June 1-2, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

After the  past year of tight schedules and focused flower-chasing to complete our second wildflower book, we’ve been looking forward to a more relaxed approach this summer.  This past weekend we set out for some serious moseying and wandering, hoping to see new places and new-to-us flowers but also just glad to be out and about.

We headed north and west toward the Fertile Sand Hill Recreation Area, making several stops along the way.  At Western Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) where in past years we’ve seen the leaves of many small white lady’s slippers we found the flowers in fresh, bright bloom, their pouches like small, smooth white eggs.  After last year’s drought and this year’s rains we also found ourselves grateful for our boots, since the  previously crunchy-dry prairie was laced with pockets and streams of water, and the ditch rimming the prairie was deep enough to lip our waders (boots).  Hoary puccoon, blue eyed grass, heart-leaved Alexanders, and golden Alexanders, false dandelion, and yellow star grass along with a few purple violets punctuated the prairie grasses.

Farther down the roadside at a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) more small white lady’s-slippers bloomed along with wild strawberry and starry false Solomon’s seal flowers frothed like foam.  Along a roadside ditch we also found a  few small yellow lady’s-slippers, which made us reconsider our plans for the weekend.  If we’d seen two of Minnesota’s six lady’s-slippers already, why not try to see them all?  

But those were plans for Sunday.  Saturday’s itinerary took us further north to Santee Prairie SNA and the adjoining Wambach WMA. More puccoon, more Alexanders and blue-eyed grass, Seneca snakeroot–and yet more small white lady’s-slippers.   

The afternoon was passing, and we had three more places we wanted to visit before finding our hotel for the night, so we headed up to the Fertile Sand Hills, where we tracked down woolly milkweed beginning to blossom and the sweet pink and white flowers of white beardtongue, which reaches the eastern edge of its range in Minnesota. A quick stop at a railroad remnant prairie revealed yet more small white lady’s-slippers, and another stop at a roadside fen dashed our hopes of finding sticky white asphodel in bloom, since the leaves were just emerging under the stems of last year’s flowers.  But the fen, which had been dirt-dry last year, brimmed with water, feeling much more fennish than before.

Sunday we started early.  No longer just moseying, we were intent on finding Minnesota’s other four lady’s-slipper orchids for a six lady’s-slipper weekend. Numbers three and four came quickly: alongside a road we spotted large yellow lady’s-slipper blooming almost blindingly yellow, and in a wet bog we  thrilled to find ram’s-head lady’s slipper a little past prime but still looking healthy and pert.  Four lady’s-slippers down, two to go.

We figured our  best bet for both was Iron Springs Bog SNA, one of our favorite places. We’d seen both showy lady’s-slipper and stemless lady’s-slipper blooming there in previous years.  We knew it was still too early for showy lady’s-slipper to be blooming, but we  hoped for stemless and some sign of showy.

As it turned out, the odds of seeing both lady’s-slippers in bloom were exactly fifty per cent.  Stemless lady’s-slippers were just opening with  flowers from creamy buds to magenta pouches nodding demurely.   No sign of this year’s showy lady’s-slipper blossoms, but last year’s tall stalks with gone-to-seed withered flowers showed us where they had grown.  When we looked closely around the bases of the old stalks, we found small, furry clumps emerging like grey-green missile cones and realized we were looking at the first above-ground signs of this year’s plants.  Before long the flowers would be blooming, but for now we counted these emerging leaves as a win–signs of all six of Minnesota’s lady’s-slippers in a single weekend.

An added orchid bonus:  early coralroot blooming nearby.

Jubilant, we moseyed on home.

See MORE of what we are seeing now!
Learn more about Minnesota’s native Lady’s-slipper orchids!