Ladyslipper Nursery

08/01/2026

07/18/2026

There is a common misconception in the gardening world that all planting must stop in the summer. So for those who don’t know, you can plant native plants in the summer as long as it’s raining or you can water them every few days. Plants are actively growing right now. That means they are putting out new growth and roots and doing what they need to do to survive and thrive. As I tell people, if we can keep thousands of plants alive in containers all summer, you can plant a few in the ground just fine. Fall is the best time for planting large trees that have had their roots cut from being balled and burlaped and it’s definitely a nice time for us as humans to plant. But, if you’re looking longingly out at your yard and wishing you had more bees and butterflies, you don’t have to wait for fall to make it happen.
We will be at the nursery today from 10-1 if you would like to come see what we have. 🦋🥰

07/17/2026

Mama bear and Cubs on the side of the Blue Ridge Parkway. What a wonderful experience.

07/17/2026

For anyone who’s never traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway the Cherahola Skyway, or to chimney rock you really should take a few days and make this trip, beautiful views loads of wildflowers and not that far from home. My best friend and I just spent four days on the motorcycles. Great views and great food. We saw elk, deer, turkey, and bears.

07/16/2026

Ghost Pipes are a plant that decided photosynthesis was optional — and somehow got away with it. What makes this stranger is that abandoning sunlight entirely and tapping into underground fungal networks has happened not once, not twice, but 30 to 40 separate times across flowering plants worldwide. That number was recently revised upward from 12. Nature keeps arriving at the same radical answer through completely different doors. The fungal networks Ghost Pipes exploit are called mycorrhizal webs — threads thinner than a human hair that connect trees and fungi in underground trading systems spanning entire forests. Ghost Pipes plug into that system and take without giving anything back. No sunlight converted. No sugar produced. Just a pale, silent drain on a network built by others. The fungi do not seem to notice. The trees keep feeding. And Ghost Pipes keep appearing in the darkest, shadiest forest floors where no other flowering plant would dare try to survive. Thirty to forty separate lineages looked at the same impossible problem and found the same ghostly exit. The most radical idea in the room keeps getting reinvented. [BUHRK]

07/15/2026

There she blows!