Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Benzie County, Michigan. Note the two stalks with last year's seed pods, one to the right and the other to the lower left of this grouping. There seems to be no agreement as to the proper scientific name of this species. Sometimes it is made a variety of the Old World species, Cypripedium calceolus, along with one, two or three other North American varieties. Sometimes it is treated as a variety of a separate North American species, Cypripedium parviflorum. Finally, the North American plants are sometimes treated as 2 or 3 separate species. There is also disagreement about the boundaries of the various North American elements of this complex. Since I tend not to use varietal names in my Flickr posts, I have chosen the narrowest name at the species level in order to pinpoint these plants, with no pretense that this name is necessarily the correct one.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Benzie County, Michigan. There seems to be no agreement as to the proper scientific name of this species. Sometimes it is made a variety of the Old World species, Cypripedium calceolus, along with one, two or three other North American varieties. Sometimes it is treated as a variety of a separate North American species, Cypripedium parviflorum. Finally, the North American plants are sometimes treated as 2 or 3 separate species. There is also disagreement about the boundaries of the various North American elements of this complex. Since I tend not to use varietal names in my Flickr posts, I have chosen the narrowest name at the species level in order to pinpoint these plants, with no pretense that this name is necessarily the correct one.