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.
