January 3, 2016
This crazy warm winter weather has confused the plants. They sent up flower stalks and are ready to bloom.

Update:
The weather turned cold again and the flower stalks are black. Dead. I hope the plant will cooperate and send up new flower shoots when Spring arrives.

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The amazingly lovely Minnesota state flower. It prefers moist and loose organic soil (full of rotted plant matter) that never dries out in the summer, on the neutral to alkaline side of things (fens rather than bogs). In the wild, it mostly grows in northeastern and north central North America. It's rare in most states because its preferred habitat is easily destroyed by human disturbance.

I had the good fortune to work at a place with an astonishingly large number of showy lady's slippers, which were mostly propagated by division. They grow in moist humusy soil that is kept moist by a spring. I didn't have the chance to divide the plants myself, but as I understand it, they have underground rhizomes with long wiry brownish roots radiating off. The rhizomes branch and develop new stems, and when a clump gets big enough, some of the rhizomes can be split off and planted as a new clump.

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