The object of my search was a flower not often found, which we children called the Indian moccasin. It did look like a moccasin, indeed, with its round blunt toe and yellow, leathery, shoe-shaped pouch. I wonder if any prospector ever looked for signs of gold with more intense excitement than I felt when searching for my little golden shoe? Everywhere I turned, in my breathless haste, yellow moccasins seemed dancing before my eyes, and I hardly knew, till my eager hands had grasped the stem, whether it was a real flower I had found or not. I hardly think I could have valued it more if I had known what I have since learned about the wonderful ways of the orchids, to which family my moccasin belonged.
Fig. 1.—Lady's-Slipper.
You may never have found this particular plant in your rambles, and yet may know some other of the orchid tribe which grows wild in our woods. The common names are so different in different places that it is hard to tell you how to know them when you see them. The putty-root, and the lady's-slipper like that in Fig. 1, are some of them. Not the touch-me-not, a plant whose seed-pods snap and curl up if you touch them, and which is sometimes called lady's-slipper.
The orchids are an eccentric family. There is scarcely one of them which is not "queer" in some way or other. They seem always to be trying to look or to act like something besides flowers. They imitate all sorts of things besides little Indian shoes. I wish I could take you into an orchid greenhouse and let you look around. You would think you had been invited to a fancy-dress party of the flowers.
There is one that looks for all the world like a swan, with its long curved neck; there is a beautiful butterfly with spotted golden wings; over yonder stands a scarlet flamingo, in a meditative attitude, on one red leg. Bees and spiders, done in brown and yellow, or perhaps more gorgeous colors, are all around. Here is a long spike of waxen flowers, and in the cup of each nestles a pure white dove with outspreading wings. The Spaniards have given it a name which means the flower of the Holy Ghost, from its resemblance to a dove.
These strange likenesses to other things are, however, the least wonderful thing about orchids. They differ from ordinary plants in many singular ways. Many of them, instead of growing in the ground, and drawing from it their food and drink, grow in the air, and take nourishment from it by means of their naked dangling roots. It seems sometimes as if living as they do high up on the bark of trees had put the notion into their heads of trying to look like birds and butterflies and bees.
The air manages to supply them with food, but they have to depend upon getting drink in some other way. Plants are a good deal like people in that respect; they can manage to get along somehow with very little food, but they soon die of thirst if deprived of water.
Fig. 2.—Young Plant growing on Flower Stem.