The Mexican Lady’s Slipper

A yellow slipper orchid from the Mexican highlands, the largest of its kind in the Americas and famously impossible in cultivation — it depends on a soil fungus that nobody could supply, so every plant collected for a European glasshouse died. Thousands were dug up anyway. The plate is one of the few honest records of what the thing looks like alive. Some plates exist because the plant refused to.

Maker

for John Lindley, Edwards’s Botanical Register

Date

1846

Medium of the original

Plate

Original held by

Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-01037