If you asked me to name the Sexiest Flower on Earth, I might say Lady Slipper Orchid…
Because this simple name embraces an entire Botanical Family*…
- Which in turn contains five genera…
- Which, in their own turn, include some 165 species…
- Comprising many hundreds of hybrids and cultivars, such as the Paphiopedilum hybrid you see here…
Most of which I think are pretty danged sexy.
Lady Slippers are so named because one of the orchid’s customary petals grows into an ingenious structure called a pouch.
And this slipper-shaped pouch is engineered to trap and coerce hapless insects, literally forcing them to pollenate! Plus, as if adding insult to indignity…
A Lady Slipper deludes the fly with phony food or sex…
Filling the air with an irresistible fragrance, this Paphiopedilum Lady Slipper displays a glistening, shield-shaped, yellow staminode.
“Must be amazing nectar!” thinks the fly, but he’s wrong! When he lights on the shiny staminode, he touches a slippery lubricant, can’t get a grip and drops into the pouch!
The fly can’t climb out, because the upper lip of the pouch curls inward. His only way out is a special, invisible ladder of hairs in the back.
And the ladder leads straight to a narrow passage, where he’s forced to rub his pollen onto the pistil , then get a new payload of pollen from hidden anthers.
Then, after being forced to pollenate this Lady Slipper, he’ll fly off to another , fall for the same trick, and submit to a similar pollen exchange.
We think of animals being smarter than plants. But who outsmarted whom here?
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*Sort of. The Lady Slipper used to be considered a Botanical Family, and there were clever taxonomists who insisted these flowers weren’t even Orchids, but their own thing. According to this argument, the Lady Slippers slipped away from the Orchids back in dinosaur days and never came back. Then some even more clever taxonomists came along with new-fangled DNA evidence and proved this theory wrong, showing the Lady Slippers were secretly orchids all along. But, whether or not they are Orchids, the name of their family (or sub-family, if indeed they are Orchids) is Cypripedioideae. (Say it three times fast. How about once and slow? This is why the cleverest taxonomists of all just call them Lady Slippers).


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