Reading Pictures

Twist of Destiny

Sometimes when you find them, the beauty is such that you are transported. There’s a timeless world of perfection that wants to make an idealist of you. This hallowed area just must be saved, you think, and forever! I have a responsibility to do it!

But some other time. Now I just bask in the presence of this jewel.

Nor will you likely find a plant like this anywhere except in glorious surroundings. Swink and Wilhelm’s Plants of the Chicago Region lists the species you’re likely to find growing beside the small yellow lady’s slipper. If you know your plants, the list means quality: scarlet painted cup, robin plantain, prairie phlox, fen thistle, swamp saxifrage.

It’s a glorious day in May. You study the plant and notice its lateral petals — two tightly twisted spirals of maroon. If those petals were more yellow, or less twisted, you’d probably have the somewhat commoner large yellow lady’s slipper (especially if you were further away from the lake and into the oak savanna, where that species usually lives). But this beauty is the rare small yellow lady’s slipper, a species of the wet prairie swales near Lake Michigan in the Calumet region. One site, saved by the Natural Resource Trustees and managed by fire for many years, now has more than 1,000 gem-like plants. (We can’t say where — the species is too rare.)

Notice that the stem of this robust specimen is topped by a leafy bract, out of which emerge both a flower stem and another main stem, which is yet again topped by another leafy bract and another flower. Bracts and flowers are not the only surprises that grow out of each other. Henry David Thoreau described being transfixed and transported by a wild orchid, and told how that moment directed him to become the person we know today. Nature is filled with such miracles, for all who are open to them.

Photo by Pat Wadecki.
Orchids protected in the Calumet region by Indiana Dunes
National Lakeshore, Indiana Department of Natural Resources,
The Nature Conservancy, and others.
Information courtesy of Paul Labus, TNC – Indiana.
Words by Stephen Packard.