A portrait of the most cunning, most patient flowers in North America.

Kneel down at a lady's slipper orchid and you are looking at a confidence trick thirty million years in the making. The pouch that stops you in your tracks was never meant for your eyes; it is a machine, tuned over deep time to lure a particular bee into working for free. And beneath that trick lies a deeper one: from its first hours as a dust-fine seed, every lady's slipper depends utterly on a fungus it cannot see, in a partnership we are only beginning to understand.

The Patient Flower is a wonder-first portrait of all twelve of North America's native lady's slipper orchids — the pink and the showy, the prairie white and the ram's-head, the serpentine specialist of the California seeps and the palomino of the Aleutian fog. It is a book about deception and dependence, about plants that can outlive the forests around them and refuse to be dug up and carried home, and about why learning to notice them is the first step to keeping them.

By the end, you will not be able to walk past one again.