By Cathy Bloome

My favorite vacation every year is attending the Native Orchid symposium. This year’s location was close to home. We listened to speaker presentations in Green Bay, then drove out to Door County, Wisconsin for the field trips. IOS members Karen Hunter and Anne Kotowski joined me in renting a house together in Green Bay. Needless to say, we had a blast!

There is a symposium yearly in the US or Canada. Every symposium has two days of speakers with topics pertaining to native orchids, then 2 days of field trips. Most of the speakers talk about native orchids, but we also always have a geologist speaker, and if there is a Native American topic of interest in the area we are visiting, we learn about that as well. There were several people that talked about the conservation of orchids and, sure enough, Dr Larry Zettler's name from Illinois college kept coming up. The IOS has donated money several times to the projects he has been working on with his students, all concerning restoration and conservation of orchids. I was proud that he is an Illinoisan and deeply committed to orchid research. Our donated money is being well spent

Our field trips were up in Door County. We had perfect weather despite all the tornadoes going on in the Chicago area. We visited The Ridges Sanctuary, which was the first land trust in Door County established nearly 90 years ago. Over the years they have acquired more land with donations and are constantly improving the habitat for native orchids and other rare plants. We saw four species of lady slippers and a couple other species for a total of 8 orchids. We explored some other areas around Door County with volunteer guides and some roadside orchid locations were given to us if we had free time to go looking on our own.

The last day a small group of attendees got chosen to visit a rare and fragile quaking fen. We were given warnings that we could fall through the floating mat at any time. It felt like you were walking on a waterbed. There were thousands of blooming pitcher plants. Quite spectacular! The orchid we came to see at the fen is called the dragon's mouth, or Arethusa bulbosa. It is one of the many orchids that are become rare due to climate change.

If your interest goes beyond growing tropical orchids in your home you might like to attend the next conference. It will be held in southern Oregon in May 2027. In my opinion, we will see the most spectacular lady slipper plant in the US, Cypripedium californicum, with many other cool orchids and plants! Check out the Native Orchid Conference website for more info.