Serenity Sunday: Slipping back

As many of us, in various parts of the Northern Hemisphere, long for ever more promises of warm weather to come, we turn to sheltered environments with flowers that either don’t grow in our areas or will not appear for some time to come, and also to memories of past days, when the ones we’re dreaming of were in their prime. My blogging buddy Mike Powell just posted an image (here) that he made recently, in the US Botanical Garden in Washington, DC, of a lady’s slipper orchid, and I was immediately drawn back to this image that I made back on the first day of spring June 21, 2007, when I found a particularly nice group of our showy lady’s slippers near our cabin in northern Minnesota.
This is the state flower of Minnesota, and is also known as the moccasin flower, pink and white lady’s slipper, and queen’s lady slipper; its taxonomic name is Cypripedium reginae. Although they are far from abundant in that area, partially due to the tendency of folks who find them to pick them or dig them up (which is illegal!), we do come across them every few years, always to our great delight. The juvenile grasshopper was unfortunately rather camera shy, and I was lucky to be able to catch this much of it before it retreated into the deeper shelter of the leaves and disappeared from view.