Where the Wild Things Are: Pink Lady Slipper Orchids and Poachers
by Heather McCargo
Some of our most beautiful and special wild plants do not belong in our gardens. When you see plants like trillium, bloodroot, trout lily, lady slipper orchids, and sods of bunchberry and blueberry, for sale at a nursery, they are more often than not dug from the wild.
The pink lady slipper orchid blooms in late spring in acidic woodlands. It’s easily recognized by its pink pouch-shaped flower on a single 12-inch stem with two bright-green pleated leaves at the base. The flowers are a challenge to pollinate, even for native bumblebees who climb through the narrow opening down to the base of the pouch where they hope to find nectar. There is no nectar, just pollen, so after visiting a few flowers, the bees learn it’s not worth the effort. Because of this, many flowers remain un-pollinated and don’t produce seeds. If, however, a flower is successfully pollinated, it will produce thousands of tiny seeds. These seeds, like the plant, depend on wild soil fungi to germinate and grow.
These conditions are very difficult to replicate in cultivation, so no one commercially propagates pink lady slipper orchids. If you see one for sale, it has certainly been dug up, and transplanting it is unlikely to be successful. Enjoy them in the wild and advocate for their protection, but leave them be.
Other woodland species, such as ferns, trilliums, bloodroot and other spring ephemerals, can be propagated in a nursery, though it is a slow process. Trillium, for example, is not difficult to propagate, but it is time consuming, and requires an understanding of the seeds and the forest understory that is its natural home.
Maine has four species of trillium that all bloom in spring. They are beautiful and dramatic, with three-petaled flowers atop three whorled leaves. The blossoms may be white, pale yellow, bicolored white with red, or maroon. Six to eight weeks after the plant blooms, the seedpod ripens by suddenly softening and falling off the plant. Ants immediately carry the seeds back to their nest, eat the nutritious, fleshy white protrusion attached to the shiny, dark-brown seeds, and discard the seeds. If conditions are good (trillium likes a humus-y woodland soil with adequate moisture and shade), the seed will lie dormant and germinate after the second spring (yes, nearly two years later). At age 7, it may have its first bloom. A mature trillium plant with multiple blooming stems can be decades old. So if you see a trillium plant for sale in a nursery with pricing similar to other perennials, you can be pretty sure it was not nursery-propagated. Ask the nursery – if they cannot tell you how it was propagated, assume it was dug up in the wild.
Unfortunately, Maine has no laws prohibiting or regulating the collection of native plants on private land and selling them for profit (other parts of the country have stricter regulations against poaching and require a permit if they do allow any wild harvesting). The only species that are protected in Maine are those listed as rare or endangered (you can see a list of Maine’s rare and endangered plants on the maine.gov website).
If you are interested in growing some of the more slow-growing woodland wildflowers like trillium, learn to propagate them yourself, rather than purchasing potentially poached plants, so that you are helping to increase, rather than decrease, their numbers.
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