January 9, 2017 – Red sun at morning, sailors' take warning.

          Country living allows one to enjoy some of the simplest pleasures in life – like watching a sunrise.

          Now that we are in the longer days of winter and there is a blanket of white snow on the ground, it is most difficult for me to try to snuggle in as the brightness wakes me up and the glowing pink washed sky that often has an under wash of pale blue makes me rouse out of bed and lingeringly enjoy the sunrise.

          It is also one of those FREE perks of not having to be on an early time schedule to hustle and get dressed and dash out of the house to work as it is “off season” with my job.

          What always comes to mind is the vibrancy of the colors and the hopeful wish that someday I will actually learn how to swash a watercolor mop brush so that the pink overlaps the blue at the horizon to create a sunrise painting.

          Yes, that is one of my “bucket list items” – experiment with water colors.

          As a kid I always enjoyed the art direction in grammar school by [I think her name was] Mrs. Purcel or Pentel or something with a P that reminded me that she was also the penmanship teacher at the time.

          I remember that every spring she would bring to class a few stems of pussy willows and a couple of stems of daffodils and put them in a simple vase on the front desk.  Watercolor paint boxes and brushes would be disbursed throughout the class room and all of us ‘possible artists’ would take up our brushes and attempt to follow her instructions.

          She made it look so simple and I watched her with fascination.  I never forgot she could make a dozen strokes and violá – a beautiful picture.

          Over the years from young childhood through teenager and adulthood I have always gravitated to the water color medium in an art gallery or at an art festival as I understand the degree of difficulty involved having experienced it as a young child and then later as a senior in highs school in an elective art class.

          The vibrant pink of the recent sunrise reminded me of the only watercolor painting I have.  This morning as I was admiring our pink sunrise I had to slip out of bed and look at the only water color painting I own to compare the color.  The pink is just about the exact shade and just as vividly bright.

          One vacation trip home to New England my retired parents and I visited the beautiful Fuller’s Gardens in Rye Beach, Maine. [If anyone is near that area, it is well worth a visit.]  There were 5 x 7 watercolor paintings for sale by a local artist on a card table that day.  I didn’t hesitate when I noticed a pink lady's slipper portrait done in watercolor.  It was not framed, just in a protective sleeve.  Do you know what I mean by the phrase, “It spoke to me?”   Shadowed by my parents at the time I quickly made my purchase and shoved it in my bulky purse.

          Later, I showed the beautiful painting to my parents and they were as charmed as I was.  My parents’ woods used to have dozens of pink lady's slippers in the spring and very few were picked as we understood that picking them would cause them to diminish over time due to the symbiotic process of its roots. [I believe they are still on the Massachusetts list of protected plants.]

          Pink lady’s slipper, (also called moccasin flower) Cypripedium acaule   

          Isn’t that ironic how I got from “red sun at morning, sailors take warning” to the warning “Do not to pick pink lady’s slippers.”

Cultural notes regarding pink lady slippers [info gathered from internet, no citations taken]

            In order to survive and reproduce, pink lady’s slipper interacts with a fungus in the soil from the Rhizoctonia genus. Generally, orchid seeds do not have food supplies inside them like most other kinds of seeds.  Pink lady’s slipper seeds require threads of the fungus to break open the seed and attach them to it.  The fungus will pass food and nutrients to the pink lady’s slipper seed.  When the lady’s slipper plant is older and producing most of its own nutrients, the fungus will extract nutrients from the orchid roots.  This mutually beneficial relationship between the orchid and fungus is known as “symbiosis” and is typical of almost all orchid species.  Pink lady’s slipper takes many years to go from seed to mature plants. Seed-bearing harvest of wild lady’s slipper root is not considered sustainable.

            Pink lady’s slippers also require bees for pollination.  The flowers are a challenge to pollinate and it is the native bumblebees that are up for the task of climbing through the narrow opening down to the base of the pouch where they hope to find nectar.  There is no nectar, just pollen, so after visiting a few flowers, the bees learn it is not worth the effort and hence many flowers do not get pollinated and produce seeds.  If, however, a flower is successfully pollinated, it will produce thousands of tiny seeds.  These seeds, like the plant, depend on wild soil fungi to germinate and grow.

          Pink lady’s slippers being on the list of protected species is easily understandable once you understand their dependence on soil fungi and inexperienced bumblebees.