Editor's Note
In 1988 the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) and the International Herb Growers and Marketers Association (IHGMA) adopted formal positions to discourage trade in species of lady’s slipper (Cypripedium spp.) collected from wild populations. These actions were taken in response to recommendations presented to IHGMA by Steven Foster and to AHPA by Mark Blumenthal. This was the first time the six-year old AHPA established a formal trade requirement, a practice it has continued to the present to address many issues relevant to its membership and the herbal products industry. Steven Foster, in the July 2021 issue of HerbalEGram, reports that the lady’s slippers can now be considered “a conservation success story." Read the full article here.
Summary

It was June 1980, my first year in the Ozarks, and I was beginning to make friends with Arkansas botanists. One botanical friend I accompanied on searches for rare plants was Richard H. Davis (1946–1983), a field ecologist for The Nature Conservancy under contract with the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. He was particularly interested in rediscovering rare plants in historical locations recorded on herbarium specimens, but not seen in their native habitats for decades.

On one exhilarating hike, we rediscovered the location of the rare Ozark-endemic yellow coneflower (Echinacea paradoxa var. paradoxa, Asteraceae), which is the only Echinacea species with yellow flowers instead of the usual purple. Another excursion took us to a historical location for the most southwestern known population of showy lady’s slipper (Cypripedium reginae, Orchidaceae), known in older works as C. spectabile. This lady’s slipper is both a “queen” and a “spectacle,” as the species names imply. It is the largest and most impressive native North American orchid and grows up to three feet tall with gorgeous three-inch-wide flowers that are whitish to translucent red on the pinkish side. It is Minnesota’s state flower.

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