: : Becoming Wildflower, and other stories of remarkable rarity

Hello community,

This is a picture that hangs, to this day, in the dining room of the home I grew up in (notice the wormy chestnut frame- there was a LOT of wormy chestnut in that cabin in the woods). My dad took this shot of a lady slipper that grew in the forest behind our house. A couple weeks ago, I was in class, and the professor asked us to share something that no one in the room knew about us. With exercises like these I love going with the first thing that pops into my brain, and for whatever reason, this beauty came to mind- mind you, this is a memory whose seed was planted some 35 years ago. Memories are amazing. I talked about how magical those Appalachian woods were, how we would stay out there for hours on end making forts and letting nature weave her way into our interior. But I found myself talking about how distinctly miraculous it felt on those years that we had the great fortune of stumbling upon a lady slipper. This memory prompted some research and I now understand a little more of the truth I knew as a kid- how rare and miraculous this moment was to be in the presence of something so magnificent.

The lady slipper is of the orchid family and are pollinated by bees that are attracted to its color and fragrance. A bee enters the colorful, inflated lip through a one-way opening and quickly discovers that there is neither pollen nor nectar available, and that it cannot readily escape. The bee can exit the flower only through two openings at the back of the lip. As it leaves from one of these openings, its back brushes against the female part of the flower, depositing a packet of pollen from the last flower that it visited, and picking up a new packet of pollen from the male part of the flower. The packet is taken to the next visited flower; the pollen is held in small packets that stick to the bee’s back where it is not accessible to the bee and can’t be scraped off by the bee's legs. Bees soon learn to avoid these flowers because they fail to provide nectar or pollen; as a result, few flowers are pollinated.

Although flowers remain on the plants for several weeks to increase the chances of pollination, fewer than 10% of plants in a population will produce fruit in a given year. Fortunately, each fruit contains thousands of seeds. But the seeds are tiny, containing no stored food reserves, and must land on a patch of soil containing a specific fungus that provides nutrients for germination and subsequent plant growth. Pink Lady’s Slipper plants dug from the wild and transplanted into gardens rarely reproduce due to the lack of this fungus. They also fail to thrive and will die after a couple of years, unless the specific fungus is present at the transplant site.

In other words, a real miracle.

Never have I been terribly moved by ancient texts and relics, but talk to me of pollen, bees and bones, and i’m over the moon. It’s all right here :)

This weekend we are going to be celebrating this miracle of grand pollination called life in a rare occurrence-

LIVE and IN PERSON!

. Please join me for

BECOMING WILDFLOWER:
A Celebration of Spring through Body, Breath & Artful Vinyasa

This Sunday! March 19th, 10am-12pm at Yellow Barn Farm

$35-55 sliding scale

I would love nothing more than to celebrate this thing of life with you and to further understand the remarkably rare occurrence we find ourselves a part of.

Space is limited and we need to have a gage of numbers so please sign up as soon as possible ~

I hope that you all stumble upon an outcropping of life that leaves you stupefied by its sheer unfiltered beauty.

Love Julia

No matter how chaotic it is, wildflowers will still spring up in the middle of nowhere.
~ Sheryl Crow