Lady's Slipper
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Lady's Slipper. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
cypripedium, or Moccasin Flower , a beautiful flowering plant of the orchid family, remarkable for an inflated lower lip. Lady's slippers are found wild in Europe, Asia, and both Americas, but not in Africa or Australia. There are six wild species in the United States northeast of a line from Minnesota to east Kansas, and thence to North Carolina . The smallest is the one-flowered, white kind, with a lip an inch in length on a stalk a hand's breadth in height. The largest is the showy lady's slipper--a royal flower with a pink, purple-spotted lip, two and one-half inches in length. Botanists recognize fifteen world species. The lady's slipper has been adopted as the state flower of Minnesota. The lady's slipper is the rarest of British wild flowers. A single species, a delicate, white, fragrant slipper, still lingers in a remote nook of Yorkshire. The few who know refuse to make its haunt public. See Orchid Lady's slipper
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a PER (Cypripedium), n genus of the plants of the natural order of the natural order ch one species, C. cal Orchideæ, of which one species, C. calceolus, is a native of Great Britain, beof Great Britain, being found in a few places in the N. of England, and is reckoned one of the most beautiful of the British orchids. The genus is remarkable for the large inflated lip of the corolla. Several very beautiful species are natives of the colder parts of North America. Many tropical and subtropical species and also garden hybrids of these are engrossing subjects of interest to British, continental, and American connoisseurs in choice and rare orchids. C. spectabilis is a North American species; C. barbatum, a native of Java.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's counted "fifteen world species" of Cypripedium; modern botanists recognise around fifty in the genus, and have moved most of the tropical plants the 1921 Collier's called exciting to orchid connoisseurs into separate genera — C. barbatum of Java is now Paphiopedilum barbatum, and the South American slippers are Phragmipedium. The British plant both accounts mention fared worse than they suggest: Cypripedium calceolus (yellow-lipped, not the white flower Aiton's describes) was collected almost to extinction, and from 1930 until recent decades Britain's wild population was a single plant in Yorkshire, its location secret and its flowering season watched round the clock by volunteers. Seed raised at Kew has since allowed reintroductions to a handful of northern sites. Minnesota's showy lady's slipper, Cypripedium reginae, remains the state flower and has been protected by state law against picking or uprooting; all slipper orchids are now regulated under the CITES treaty on trade in endangered species.
Written for this edition, 2026.