This is the first year that every single Cypripedium in our garden has bloomed — and sequentially, no less, so we’ve had lady’s slippers all May.
No, these were not in our garden, but well worth the mile-long hike in 94 degree heat up the trail across the road from our house.
First identified in Europe, Cypripedium was known as “Our Lady’s Slipper,” in honor of a pretty legend that it had been created by the infant Jesus as a shoe for his mother. But the great taxonomer who established its binomial nomenclature, Carl Linneaus, was also a staunch Swedish Protestant, and so would have no truckle with such papish nonsense. So he established the genus’ current name, whose prefix, “Cypri” honors a very different legendary lady, Aphrodite, who was said to be born in Cyprus.
A similar cultural conflict underpins the naming of the American Cypripedium. Originally, it was known as the Moccasin Flower, and associated with a Native American legend about a young girl who ran across the snow on bleeding feet in order to get medicine for her dying village. Thus, the plant was associated with untamed wilderness rather than civilization. As Almira Lincoln Phelps wrote in her Familiar Lectures of Botany, “the Orchis tribe” are “opposing all attempts at civilization, [and] are to be found only in the depths of the forest…. we may, in this respect, compare them to the aboriginal inhabitants of America, who seem to prefer their own native wilds to the refinements and luxuries of civilized life.” Yet by 1900, the plant had gained its current association with luxury and culture and was more commonly called the lady’s slipper, like its European relatives.
Elaine Goodale’s youthful poem, “The Moccasin Flower,” also captures this wild character of what is usually perceived as among the most delicate of hothouse plants.
Yet shy and proud among the forest flowers,
In maiden solitude,
Is one whose charm is never wholly ours,
Nor yielded to our mood:
One true-born blossom, native to our skies,
We dare not claim as kin,
Nor frankly seek, for all that in it lies,
The Indian’s moccasin.
Despite the conventional sweetness of this portrait, Goodale’s life was as wild and proud as she claimed the Moccasin Flower to be. Raised in a New England Transcendentalist family, Elaine and her equally talented sister, Dora Read Goodale, published their first book of poetry at ages 15 and 12, respectively. Elaine went on to teach at the Indian Department of Hampton Institute, a Historically Black Institution, then started a day school on a Dakota reservation in 1886, before she was was appointed as Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas by 1890. She married Dr. Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiye S’a), who was the first Native American to graduate from medical school and become a physician. When they moved east, Goodale collaborated with her husband in writing about his childhood and Sioux culture, managing his publicity and about 25 lecture tours annually. They also collaborated on writing, and he published eight books, while Goodale Eastman published three. The marriage ended in separation among allegations of infidelity and an illegitimate daughter, but Goodale continued her own writing after both the separation and Eastman’s death, publishing her last book of poetry in 1930, and a biography and last novel in 1935.
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