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Pink Lady's Slipper
One of North America's most beautiful native wild orchids - a pink pouch flower of acidic eastern woodlands - and a plant to protect rather than pick: it cannot survive being dug from the wild because it depends on a specific soil fungus.
Safety notes Not a food or medicine plant - grow it purely to appreciate. The hazard is skin contact, not eating: glandular hairs on the leaves and stems carry cypripedin, which causes an itchy, poison-ivy-like rash in sensitive people, so wear gloves. Far more important is the conservation caution: never dig or pick wild plants. It is slow-growing, protected in many states, and depends on a soil fungus, so wild collection is both often illegal and almost always fatal to the plant.
Overview
The pink lady's slipper (Cypripedium acaule) is one of the most beautiful and beloved wild orchids in North America - and one of the most misunderstood. Each spring, from a pair of ribbed basal leaves, it sends up a single leafless stalk topped by one extraordinary flower: a large, veined, pink pouch shaped like a slipper or moccasin, which gives the plant its names. It grows wild in the acidic soils of eastern woodlands, pine barrens, and bog edges, from eastern Canada down through the Appalachians.
The one thing to knowEach spring, from a pair of ribbed basal leaves, it sends up a single leafless stalk topped by one extraordinary flower: a large, veined, pink pouch shaped like a slipper or moccasin, which gives the plant its names.
Quick facts
- Height
- 10 inRange: 6–15 in
- Spread
- 12 inRange: 8–15 in
- Cold
- Takes hard frostdamaged below -35°F
- Heat
- Struggles above 85°F
- Life cycle
- Perennial, lives about 20 years
- Soil
- Well-drained
- Water
- Medium
- Plant spacing
- 12 inRange: 8–18 in
When to plant
Nothing is open today. Spring transplanting opens 5 months, Mar 27 to May 22.
- Transplant Mar 27 – May 22 Opens in 159 daysAbout 2 weeks before to 6 weeks after your last frost (Apr 10 here)Plant ONLY nursery-propagated stock in spring into acidic, humusy, sharply drained shade. Never wild-dug plants. Even good stock is slow and unpredictable - success is far from guaranteed, so treat any planting as an experiment in stewardship.
- Transplant Aug 16 – Sep 27 Opens in 301 daysAbout 10 weeks before to 4 weeks before your first frost (Oct 25 here)Early-fall planting of dormant nursery stock can also work in cooler zones, letting roots settle before winter. Keep the acidic leaf-litter mulch and then leave the plant undisturbed.
Frost here: last around Apr 10 (Mar 27 to Apr 24 most years), first around Oct 25. Zone averages, your own yard may run a week or two either way.
Life stages
Establish, grow, repeat
Getting established and returning each season are different parts of the story.
Stage 1 of 4 · Getting established
Settling in (very slow)
About the first 2 years after planting
Care at this stage
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Plant ONLY nursery-propagated stock, and leave it be
Set out only reputably nursery-propagated plants (never wild-dug) into acidic, humusy, sharply drained woodland soil in shade. It resents disturbance and may sulk or vanish for a year after planting. Do not move, divide, or fuss over it - the single most reliable way to keep it is to plant it well once and then leave it completely alone.
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Mulch with acidic pine or oak leaf litter
Mimic its native forest floor with a light mulch of pine needles or oak leaves, which keeps the soil acidic (pH around 4-5), cool, and moist and feeds the soil fungus the orchid depends on. Do not add lime, compost, or fertilizer, which raise pH and can kill it.
Months are typical seasonal windows; climate, variety, and plant age can shift them.
Watch out for
3 to know. 2 are high-risk: Soil Disturbance & pH Change, Wild Collection (Poaching). 1 is active in October.
Soil Disturbance & pH ChangeSeverity High DisordernowSeason: year-roundDecline, yellowing, or disappearance after nearby digging, liming, fertilizing, or 'improving' the soil.
Decline, yellowing, or disappearance after nearby digging, liming, fertilizing, or 'improving' the soil.
Stop all amendment and disturbance; restore acidic leaf-litter conditions and leave it alone - recovery, if any, is slow and not guaranteed.
Keep the soil acidic (pH ~4-5) with natural pine/oak leaf litter, add no lime, ash, compost, or fertilizer, and never cultivate, dig, or divide around the plant.
Its fungal partnership and acidic soil are fragile: liming, fertilizing, adding compost, digging, or otherwise disturbing the soil around it raises the pH or breaks the fungal network and kills the plant - a common, avoidable way gardeners lose it.
Wild Collection (Poaching)Severity High DisorderSeason: Apr–SepWild plants being dug or flowers being picked; nursery plants of dubious origin that may actually be wild-collected.
Wild plants being dug or flowers being picked; nursery plants of dubious origin that may actually be wild-collected.
There is no fix once a plant is dug and fails - prevention is everything. Report illegal collection on protected land, and support nursery propagation and habitat protection instead.
Never dig or pick wild lady's slippers; buy only reputably nursery-propagated stock; leave wild colonies undisturbed and discourage others from collecting.
Not a pest but the greatest threat to trilliums: digging plants from the wild. Wild-dug trilliums transplant poorly, wild populations take a decade or more to rebuild, and much cheap 'nursery' trillium is actually unsustainably or illegally collected - depleting forests for plants that often die anyway.
Deer (browse resistance)Severity Medium WildlifeSeason: May–JulGrowth cleanly missing overnight, with the plant browsed back to a level line about as high as a deer can comfortably reach.
This matters more than ordinary browsing: the plant is very slow to recover and depends on its few leaves to feed the roots, so repeated browsing can weaken or eliminate a colony over time. There is no quick fix - a browsed plant needs time and its leaves intact.
Growth cleanly missing overnight, with the plant browsed back to a level line about as high as a deer can comfortably reach. Ragged, torn stem ends rather than the clean angled cut a rabbit leaves - the single most reliable identifier. Buds and flowers gone while the foliage below is untouched, since deer often take the best part first. Hoof prints and droppings in soft ground near the damage. Repeat visits, with fresh damage each morning once a planting has been found. On young trees, shredded and stripped bark and broken low branches in autumn - that is antler rubbing rather than feeding.
There is no chemical fix, only exclusion and recovery. Get physical protection up immediately after the first damage, because deer return to a known meal, and reinforce or rotate whatever you were relying on before. Most plants regrow from browsing if the crown and roots are intact - feed and water a grazed plant and protect the regrowth while it comes back. What does not recover in the same season is anything whose buds or flowers have been taken, and a young tree whose bark has been rubbed right around the trunk is usually lost. Where deer pressure is genuinely heavy, the honest answer is to fence properly or to grow the plants deer leave alone, rather than to keep replacing losses.
Fencing is the only thing that reliably works. Eight feet is the standard for excluding deer, or two parallel four-foot fences a few feet apart, which they will not jump because they cannot judge the landing. Short of that, cage individual plants: a sturdy wire cage or trunk guard around every young tree, left on until the trunk is thick and the canopy is above browse height, prevents both browsing and antler rubbing and is the single highest-value thing you can do for a young tree. Repellent sprays do help at moderate pressure, but they wash off and deer habituate, so reapply after rain and rotate between different types through the season. Motion-activated sprinklers, scent deterrents, and noise devices work for a while and then stop. Siting matters too: plants close to the house, in daily traffic, and screened behind other planting get browsed less than the same plant out at the boundary.
Deer are the largest garden problem across much of the country, and where pressure is high they set the limit on what you can grow at all. They browse at night and around dawn and dusk, taking tender shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit within about five feet of the ground, and they come back night after night to anything they have found and liked. Because they have no upper incisors they tear rather than cut, leaving ragged stem ends - that is how you tell deer damage from a rabbit's clean angled cut. In fall, bucks rub their antlers on young trunks and can strip the bark right around a stem, which kills a young tree outright. Palatability varies enormously between plants and between seasons: a herd short of food in late winter eats things it ignores in June, and no plant is truly deer-proof.
Good & bad neighbors
Plant nearby
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Native pines and oaks (the woodland canopy)Pink lady's slipper lives in the dappled shade and acidic leaf litter beneath pines and oaks; their needle-and-leaf duff keeps the soil acidic and cool and supports the soil fungus the orchid depends on.
- Traditional pairings, thin evidence
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Shares the same acidic, humusy, sharply drained woodland soil that pink lady's slipper requires; a healthy stand of native lowbush blueberry is a good sign the ground is acidic enough to suit the orchid.
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An acid-loving native shrub of the same eastern woodland; the light shade of mountain laurel and its shared preference for acidic, well-drained soil mirror where pink lady's slipper naturally grows.
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A natural acidic-woodland companion - both grow in the cool, acid, humus-rich soil under pines and oaks, and wintergreen makes a fitting low evergreen groundcover in the same habitat.
Varieties · 3
You pick one when you add Pink Lady's Slipper to your garden. Its days to maturity set your harvest window.
Pink Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)
The classic species itself: two ribbed basal leaves and a single leafless stalk bearing one pink, veined, pouch-shaped 'slipper' flower in late spring.
Variety details for Pink Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)
A single pink, deeply veined pouch flower nodding on a leafless stalk above two ribbed basal leaves.
speciesnativewild-orchidacid-soilA plant of acidic eastern woodlands that depends on a soil fungus and resists transplanting - grown only from nursery-propagated stock, and best simply protected where it grows.
White-flowered form (Cypripedium acaule f. albiflorum)
An uncommon naturally white-flowered form of the same species, occasionally found in wild populations - identical in every way except that the pouch is pure white rather than pink.
Variety details for White-flowered form (Cypripedium acaule f. albiflorum)
The same pouch-shaped slipper flower, but pure white instead of pink, over two ribbed basal leaves.
nativecolor-variantrarewhite-flowerA rare treat to spot in the wild; like all lady's slippers, to be admired and protected in place, never dug.
Showy Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium reginae) - related species
A related native lady's slipper (not the same plant) of wetter, more calcareous northern fens and swamps, with a larger white-and-rose pouch and leafy stems.
Variety details for Showy Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium reginae) - related species
Robust leafy stems topped by large white pouches flushed rose-pink; a wetland orchid, unlike the dry-woods pink lady's slipper.
related-speciesnativewetlandpink-and-whiteSomewhat more amenable to careful cultivation than pink lady's slipper, but still a protected, slow, specialist orchid - included for contrast. Also never to be dug from the wild.
Grower tips
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