_Preferred Habitat--Deep_, rocky, or sandy woods.

_Flowering Season_--May-June.

_Distribution_--Canada southward to North Carolina, westward to
Minnesota and Kentucky.

Because most people cannot forbear picking this exquisite flower that
seems too beautiful to be found outside a millionaire's hothouse, it is
becoming rarer every year, until the finding of one in the deep forest,
where it must now hide, has become the event of a day's walk. Once it
was the commonest of the orchids.

"Cross-fertilization," says Darwin, "results in offspring which vanquish
the offspring of self-fertilization in the struggle for existence." This
has been the motto of the orchid family for ages. No group of plants has
taken more elaborate precautions against self-pollination or developed
more elaborate and ingenious mechanism to compel insects to transfer
their pollen than this.

The fissure down the front of the Pink Lady's Slipper is not so wide but
that a bee must use some force to push against its elastic sloping sides
and enter the large banquet chamber where he finds generous
entertainment secreted among the fine white hairs in the upper part.
Presently he has feasted enough. Now one can hear him buzzing about
inside, trying to find a way out of the trap. Toward the two little
gleams of light through apertures at the end of a passage beyond the
nectary hairs he at length finds his way. Narrower and narrower grows
the passage until it would seem as if he could never struggle through;