The following morning, after my strenuous excursion through the swamps of Etchowog, I was somewhat tired and stiffened, but still ready for a journey which must be made to North Adams, a distance of ten miles from Mount Œta. As it was Saturday, Lorenna’s mother would soon be passing over the hill on her way to that city, with butter and eggs, so I decided to accompany her. Lorenna’s mother, formerly a teacher in District Fourteen in the neighborhood, had always considered my propensity for tramping through these bogs and woodlands, searching for flowers, as rather “queer.” This habit, coupled with my fondness for the poets, led her to believe I had sustained some great sorrow,—perhaps the loss of a lover,—and in those early days she invariably eyed me closely through her green goggles as I met her on the road. My evident annoyance and embarrassment under this scrutiny probably confirmed her suspicions. Nevertheless, she so far forgot her interest in this subject as to tell me to-day that Lorenna, on her way home with the cows the night previous, had found one of the strangest little flowers. None of them had ever seen the blossom before, nor did they know its name. She felt sure, however, that it belonged to the Nervine Family,—as they locally call the Moccasin-Flowers in many New England towns,—from the leaves and the little shoe-shaped flower.

That evening, as soon as the sun sank in the west, and the cool hours of twilight came, I sought Lorenna’s house in the vale below Mount Œta. As I sauntered through the fields, the distant sounds of Pownal’s church bells and the barking of dogs and the rolling wheels of the home-coming farmers’ wagons arose from the valley.

Under my arm I had tucked Baldwin’s Orchids of New England, a book which I had drawn from the North Adams Library, with permission to keep it as long as I desired, the calls for such books being very infrequent. This work contains many illustrations of species of orchids found in the New England States, and more especially in Vermont, the author having made his excursions and collections of species near Burlington, in the northwestern portion of the State. Among the sketches is one of the Ram’s-Head Cypripedium,[9] the species having been collected by him in cedar wood, in the neighborhood of Burlington, where he reports a colony of twenty plants.[10]

Arriving at Lorenna’s home, my hopes were realized, and I was introduced to the first fresh specimen I had ever seen of the Cypripedium arietinum. Later I was shown the spot where the flower grew. I was hoping to find several plants, but was disappointed. I studied the soil and locality, however, which gave me the clue for fresh trails. We had followed a winding wood-road that led from the Centre Road into the deep pine forests on the Amidon Farm, where the ground was strewn with piny needles and glittering with the Stars-of-Bethlehem, Goldthread blossoms, and the Painted Wake Robins. The broken stem that had borne the conical shoe stood on a rocky hillside, at the base of a chestnut tree. A dwarfed pine seedling was also struggling to grow in the hard soil, among the fibrous roots of the Ram’s-Head. The two had probably taken root there at the same time. We marked the spot, and sheltered the plant from the browsings of cows, by planting dead twigs near it.

Before the evening was ended, Lorenna’s mother had discovered that others besides myself must have made excursions afield and abog for flowers and herbs, and no doubt at some time in their lives must have also read poetry and made sketches. She became very much in earnest over a text-book on botany, and desired Lorenna to have a child’s manual.

Baldwin writes of the Ram’s-Head Cypripedium: “In Northern New England, one is sometimes fortunate enough to gather with the Yellow Lady’s Slippers, especially with the dwarf species, the Ram’s-Head Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium arietinum), the rarest species North America produces, and to me, the most attractive.”[11]

The flower is peculiarly conical in shape and slightly fragrant. Baldwin was the first botanist to discover a “musk-like odor” to the roots of this plant, which I also have observed. The structure of this species differs from all other known Cypripediums by producing six distinct parts to its perianth, all the sepals being free to the base. There is in the regular structure of Cypripediums a union of the two lower sepals, usually showing a bifid condition at the apex, when not perfectly united, as shown, if closely studied, in some of the accompanying illustrations.

The brown-pink sepals of the Ram’s-Head are all free, and, twisting gracefully, remind one of the horns of a sheep’s or ram’s head, while the apex of the labellum serves for the nose. The labellum is of a dull purplish color, mottled or checked with white veins upon the crest of the shoe. The apex or toe is of a dull brownish green, the orifice of the labellum is triangular, filled with downy white hairs, and not large enough to admit a baby’s finger-tip. The flower, however, varies, as does also the plant, in size, according to the soil and the age of plant, those found in damp cedar swamps being a foot or more in height, adorned with large flowers, while those along the hillsides are from six to ten inches high.

This rare orchid is seldom, if ever, collected by botanists. It is one of the smallest Moccasin-Flowers found in the Northern Atlantic Region. The pigmy of the genus is Cypripedium fasciculatum, found under young Conifers in open woods in the swamp regions of northern California, along the Pacific slope, exclusively west of the Continental Divide. The Cypripedia found in the Pacific Region are very different from those of the Atlantic, Cypripedium Californicum, for instance, producing a simple raceme bearing from three to twelve flowers, all emerging from the axils of leafy bracts, the stem often growing four feet high. The shoe-shaped flowers resemble miniature blossoms of our eastern Cypripedium reginæ in color and structure of sepals and petals.

The Ram’s-Head Cypripedium is certainly one of the rarest species on the continent, and appears to be more plentiful, if this word can be used of so scarce a flower, in the State of Vermont than in any other region that has been reported in its continental range. It grows in low, damp marl and peat swamps.