Pagina 49 - Juliana_Book_eng

49
This tiny flower reminded him of a past event, when he wrote the story
Cyclamen, titled after this symbol of romantic love. The German governess tore
off the korchek and asked Doctor Hrast:
“Do you know what the meaning of this thing is? Oh, you really don’t know!?
Well, it’s dedication and patience – that’s the meaning of this flower in front of
you, sir.”
The purple cyclamen has a globose tuber in the ground. The leaves are basal,
simple, heart- or kidney-shaped, with a toothed margin, dark green, glittering
and silvery spotted above, dark red beneath. The carmine red, nodding and
pleasantly smelling flowers have the corolla lobes turned backwards. The plant
thrives across the whole of Slovenia in mountain forests; the general distribution extends widely in southern and
central Europe.
Particularly the raw tubers are highly toxic, for they contain glycosides that cause vomiting, stomach problems and
diarrhea. In folk medicine, the plant was once used as a powerful laxative. It was also used by some mediaeval women
in witchcraft practising.
Cypripedium calceolus L. – Lady’s Slipper
In his work entitled From Yesteryear, Julius Kugy asked himself, and proposed
at the same time, where in Juliana we should stop for at least a moment:
“Or in a quiet nook, where the Lady’s slipper, which is so rare in the Julian
Alps, is thriving and luxuriantly blossoming in the popular environment of
dwarf-pine and rhododendron? For us, these are places consecrated to the
plants’ mysteries, where we should devotedly dwell for a moment or two.
There is no other way.”
When thinking of orchids, we usually imagine tropical flowers of the most
unusual forms and colours. However, in Slovenia a few representatives of this
family grow in meadows and forests: Green-winged orchids, black vanilla
orchids ... and the Lady’s slipper can compete with numerous tropical relatives
owing to their simple but selected beauty. This species already aroused the imagination of ancient botanists, who
named it Venus’s slipper (cypris = Venus, pedilon = slipper). Among Slovenian folk names, there is also the term
‘Mary’s little slippers’.
This species has the largest flowers among all European orchids. They consist of four brownish, dark red, oblong tepals
and a swollen lemon- to golden yellow, slipper-shaped labellum. This plant is pollinated only by females of insects
belonging to the order Hymenoptera. The slipper-like labellum is in fact a trap from which the caught insects can
escape only by shifting past the stamens and stigma.
The plant can be found in temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere. It grows very slowly, since it needs no less than
15-17 years to grow from seed to such an extent that it can blossom for the first time!
Cytisus purpureus Scop. – Scarlet Dwarf Broom
(Chamaecytisus purpureus)
In the second edition of his Flora Carniolica (1772), the naturalist I. A.
Scopoli published a description of a new species. All its details and natural
sites had been sent to him by F. K. Wulfen, a citizen of Ljubljana between
1762 and 1763. Wulfen apparently saw the purple broom along the Soča River
near Solkan, at the Mrzlek spring at the foot of Sveta gora and on Šmarna gora
near Ljubljana. At a later date he published an even more precise description
and two additional sites in Jacquin’s Booklet (1778): along the Sava River near
Dol and in meadows along the Sava at Ponoviče.
The purple broom grows in the Southern Alps from Lake Como towards the
eas, to the Istrian karst and down to the northwestern Dinarides in Croatia.
In Slovenia, the plant thrives in rocky, shrubby places and in pine forests, as well as on dry and overgrown river
gravels on carbonate bedrock, from the lowlands to the montane belt. The general distribution extends to Dinaric, pre-
alpine, perhaps even pre-dinaric, sub-mediterranean, sub-pannonian and Alpine regions.
Dactylorhiza maculata (L.) Soó subsp. maculata – Heath Spotted
Orchid
This species is classified into the orchid family (Orchidaceae), which is one of the richest among all flowering plants.
Most orchid species are tropical, but in Slovenia some 80 orchid species are known.
Transplanting of orchids to the Juliana Botanical Garden has always caused numerous problems. Adult plants develop