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image by Yuen-Ping on flickr

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The ladyslipper, I found out recently, is considered endangered. It doesn’t grow in the wild the way it does in domestic gardens. I’m not sure why this surprised me – I guess I’ve seen it come up so often as a seed variety in catalogs that I forget domestication of a plant in no way negates it’s possible endangered status – just like animals raised in captivity are not the same as their in-the-wild relations, domestic plants have genetic variations that wild plants don’t have.

People give a lot of thought to endangered animals because so many of them are cuddly. But plants – even the small ones – are just as important as they’re our planet’s primary oxygen supply. The more of them we have, the better off we are.

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I would say that most of the time when I’m working with dried herbs, it usually involves dumping them in water and stirring a lot. While I’m aware of the art of the pressed flower, I’ve always been a bit blank as to its practical applications. Sure, people put them in bookmarks and use them in bookmarks, but now that flowers aren’t a secret code between you and your beau, what applications do they have?

Apparently, as I learned from a visit to the Bell Museum of natural history, they have use in taxidermy and dioramas. While most musuems have been able to move on to other methods of learning, the Bell’s standby at the moment is its dioramas – and the creation of them is a real art form.

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One of my awesome HandmadeMN teammates included me in this treasury!

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image by machamin on flickr

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