Lady's Slipper orchid set to make a comeback in the UK
Thanks to ten years of hard work and dedication by some of Britain's top botanists the rarest flower on these shores, the Lady's Slipper orchid, may again flourish in our green and pleasant land. The flower was declared extinct in 1917, after it was dug up and collected by the Victorians, who were obsessed with beautiful orchids, but a single flower was discovered by a botanist in 1930 and since then it has been more heavily guarded than the crown jewels. The location of the solitary orchid is top secret, but is rumoured to be somewhere on the North Yorkshire Moors.
[via The Guardian]
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A group of around 12 botanists, known as the Cypripedium Committee (Cypripedium calceolus being the flower's Latin name), are so paranoid about disturbing the ground around the single remaining specimen they have only visited the secret site once in 20 years.
Work began back in the 90s to reproduce the flower, and seeds were taken from the original and cultivated at Kew Gardens, but they didn't germinate as it turns out the seeds have to be unripe for this to happen. Eventually seedlings were grown, but before they were reintroduced to the wild it was found they contained genes from a similar plant from Western Europe. To date, 550 'pure plants' have been cultivated and 100 have been secretly introduced into the wild, but only 4 have flowered so far. The plant's reproduction cycle is so complicated it's proving very difficult to create flowering orchids, despite the ten years research. The botanists have vowed to keep working until the Lady's Slipper is back growing on our hillsides, but they have also vowed never to divulge the location of the original, last surviving flower.
