‘There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples:
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.’
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (circa 1601)
Dorset
May 2013
Orchids are the most charismatic flowers in the Plant Kingdom. Each species has its own personality: there are cheats and thieves, court jesters and hipsters, psychics, librarians and royalty. And each flower, in turn, comes with its own idiosyncrasies.
They also assume a multitude of colours, shapes and sizes. In Britain there are orchids in the shape of spiders, lizards, butterflies and monkeys; there are even some that play dead. Some are only a few centimetres tall, while others can reach over a metre. Ask an orchid enthusiast about their interest and it won’t be long before they are showing you albums dedicated to pyramids, slippers, soldiers and birds’ nests. Each species smells and feels different too. Some are noisome, such as the Lizard Orchid, which gives off a revolting stench of billy goat; others are delicately perfumed. Some are furry and produce scents so subtle they are undetectable by humans.
The winter of my gap year seemed to stretch on for ever, cold and miserable. My vision of walking through swathes of wildflowers in the sun was quickly becoming hidden behind the rain-lashed windows of a never-ending winter. As I tidied supermarket shelves, I wondered, not for the first time, whether spring would ever come.
February rolled into March and then April, and still the clouds hung low. I spent days meticulously planning and replanning my summer, distracting myself by tracking down sites for rare species and flicking repeatedly through the well-thumbed pages of my orchid books.
Winter is always a frustrating time for botanists. The season has a lot to offer ornithologists and other naturalists, but there is little for the plant lover. Only the truly enthusiastic turn to tiny green mosses or leafless trees to satisfy their botanical needs; in the absence of flowers, many of us go into hiding.
As the end of April approached, the anticipation of seeing my first orchid of the season gripped me and wouldn’t let go. The air was warmer and with agonising slowness, the tell-tale signs of spring began to appear. Fresh leaves emerged from the hawthorn, the dawn chorus resumed and the air was filled with the scent of daffodils, crocuses and freshly mown grass.
One day after work, I went for a walk in Bentley Wood, intending to gauge the progress of the transitioning season. Bentley is just down the road from my village, and is more famous for butterflies than orchids. As a child, I searched with my father for pearl-bordered fritillaries and white admirals along the woodland rides there each summer. One August, we waited for hours with scores of butterfly enthusiasts to catch a glimpse of the purple emperor, and were rewarded handsomely when one flew down and landed in the boot of our car. Its wings shimmered in the sunshine, opening and closing with audible, sharp clicks.
But at winter’s end, Bentley Wood is a very different place. It had been another miserable, wet April day. The damp smell of sodden leaf mulch lay heavily in the air and rivulets of water trickled past me as I climbed the twisted path up the hill.
An ancient bank of earth ran along the edge of the wood; it once would have served to keep livestock out. In Medieval times, woodland was bounded by banks and ditches to demark ownership or parish limits. These perimeter boundaries have long since succumbed to nature and become woven into the fabric of the wood, but they remain a reliable indicator of ancient woodland.
I followed the boundary south, alternating between the path and a bank covered in wood melick and sedges, and wading through ankle-deep dog’s-mercury. Two jays erupted into argument, startling me. One of them flew down and landed in a white-starred blackthorn on the woodland edge, expertly avoiding the dark thorns protruding from its depths. It caught my eye and leapt upwards with a shriek, snagging a wing on a cluster of thorns and surrendering a single bright-azure feather.
The beech trees here were old and gnarled, their trunks a pallet of merging greys. Desiccated boughs from a forgotten storm lay scattered among knotted roots thicker than my arm.
Caught up in admiring my surroundings, I almost missed the rosette of brown-splotched leaves nestled behind a tree stump. These were the leaves of the Early Purple Orchid, one of the earliest orchids to flower and a likely contender for my first species of the year. I was pleased with the find, but to my dismay, there was no sign of a developing flower – confirmation that the season was going to be severely delayed. This would make it more difficult to predict when different species would flower.
Leaves are the first tangible stage of an orchid’s life cycle. Some produce basal rosettes where the foliage grows close to the ground, while others produce leaves on the stem as they grow. As the season progresses, the stem, or flowering spike, grows a head of flowers called an inflorescence. Orchid flowers are made up of six petal-like structures: three on the outside called sepals and three on the inside called petals, one of which looks different from the others and is called the lip. The flowers are pollinated, often by insects, producing tiny, dust-like seeds so light that a small breath of wind is enough to disperse them.
Orchid seeds are special. Most seeds are sent off into the world by their parent plant with a packed lunch of starch and other sugars. This food store, known as the endosperm, is meant to tide over the young seedling until it is able to begin photosynthesising of its own accord. This allows the seed to germinate quickly under suitable conditions. Orchid seeds, however, don’t have an endosperm. As a result, they are miniscule, typically weighing two to eight micrograms – less than one-fifth of the average grain of sand. The early growth of an orchid is extremely slow: nothing resembling a normal seedling is visible for months or even years, as most species will not flower within the first four or five years of their lifetime.
How, then, does the young orchid survive its early life without an endosperm? The answer: with the help of a fungus that grows in its roots. More than 90 percent of the world’s plants are thought to be associated with fungi at some point in their life cycle. Orchids take this relationship to the extreme and are entirely dependent on them while they are underground. Once they have germinated, most species maintain a functioning relationship with their fungal partner, which has allowed orchids to adapt and prosper in poorer habitats like deeply shaded woods, or the nutrient-poor soils of heaths and bogs. This relationship between orchids and fungi is known as a mycorrhiza (literally ‘fungus root’).
That day in Bentley Wood, I found four Early Purple rosettes altogether. It was impossible to tell how old the plants in front of me were, or whether they would flower that year. But it was a start, the first sign of many more to come.
When May arrived, a string of fine days brought the first butterflies of the year. Orange-tips and brimstones danced around the garden, waiting patiently as the trees burst into leaf. In the woods, exposed pathways were suddenly enclosed in a protective shroud of green. That year, an extremely hot May bank holiday gripped the nation. The headlines read ‘All Hail the Arrival of Summer’ and those in the botanical world began busily estimating the length of the delay to the season.
I had my own concerns. The excitement over the sudden influx of summer made me wonder whether the year’s first orchids would come and go too swiftly, as plants struggled to reorient themselves around the season. Once again, my car was in the garage. We were closing in on the middle of May and I had yet to see one orchid. My schedule had already been blown; I carefully recalculated my plans and waited for my car’s return, as stories of flowering orchids across the south of England started coming in thick and fast.
I relied heavily on online nature forums – where experts and enthusiasts post photos and sightings from their local areas – for the latest news on flowering times. Given how distorted the season was set to be after the long winter, this resource would prove increasingly invaluable throughout the summer.
Even my parents were worried, checking with me constantly to make sure I wasn’t going to miss the first species. On top of this, I had only passed my driving test four months previously, and while I had been driving to and from work since, I was about to embark on my first long-distance journey. Concerns about my safety, whether the satnav would work and what would happen if I put the wrong fuel in my car were expressed repeatedly in the Bersweden household in the days leading up to my first excursion.
The forums had exploded with sightings of Early Spider Orchids, one of Britain’s rarer species, on the south coast and made for torturous reading while the delays continued with my car. Already, my head was filled with fear of failure.
After a particularly agonising weekend in mid-May, I finally set off for the Dorset coast to hunt for the Early Spiders. I passed through Wareham and twisted my way towards Swanage. Corfe Castle came and went, giving way to heathland bathed in yellow flowering gorse, and then the brightly coloured cottages of the Swanage sea-front.
Just outside town, on the Jurassic cliffs, lies Durlston Country Park, a nature reserve that has become one of my favourite botanical haunts. Purbeck limestone has been quarried along this stretch of coastline since the first century AD and transported for use around the country, most notably to rebuild parts of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Old coastal quarries west of Durlston at Winspit, Seacombe and Dancing Ledge provide unique habitats that have been left undisturbed for decades; these have been exploited by Early Spider Orchids.
I pulled into the car park at Durlston, and sat there, taking a moment to collect myself. This was it: the months of waiting were finally over and my adventure was about to begin. There were fifty-two orchids out there waiting to be found. Eventually, booted up and suitably camera-laden, I set off through the scrub and out on to the hillside.
The wind nearly blew me off my feet. Wiping my bleary eyes, I held a gate open for an elderly couple who mouthed their thanks, not even bothering to shout. But as I battled my way along to the first meadow, I reached a small copse and felt the wind drop dramatically. Immediately, I could hear again. The wonderful melody of a skylark floated down from above and a blackbird plinked from a nearby blackthorn. My eyes settled on the thousands of cowslips that formed a sea of yellow stretching all the way up the meadow and it was as if a switch had been thrown somewhere deep inside me: I was in plant-hunting mode. One minute I was fighting my way across the downs resenting the weather, the next I was striding along completely impervious, my eyes sweeping the grass either side of the path like a search light.
And then it happened: orchid number one appeared in front of me several feet from the footpath, not an Early Spider, but an Early Purple.
I stopped short, surprised by how quickly I’d found my first species. There were the blotched leaves I’d seen a few weeks before, a darkly stained stem and a loosely arranged inflorescence of deep-pink flowers. Amusingly, each flower holds two sepals aloft, giving the illusion of tufted rabbit ears.
In a quick search of the area, I counted roughly thirty Early Purples. There was quite a bit of variation in colour even in this small colony, from a rich violet through to pastel pink; a few were so pale they were almost white.
The Early Purple is one of the most widespread species of orchid in Britain. It is a delight to find, whether among carpets of bluebells in an ancient copse or growing with primroses and cowslips in an old hay meadow. The first British record of a sighting was made by William Turner in 1562. In his Herball, Turner writes, ‘there are divers kindes of orchis… one kinde… hath many spottes in the leafe and is called adder grasse in Northumberland.’
Few of our native orchids have ever been common enough to warrant the assignment of local names. The Early Purple has almost a hundred. The English botanist Nicholas Culpeper wrote in The English Physitian (1652) that it ‘hath gotten almost as many several names attributed to the several sorts of it, as would almost fill a Sheet of Paper; as Dogstones, Goat-stones, Fool-stones, Fox-stones, Satirion, Cullians, together with many others, too tedious to rehearse’.
While many of these names have fallen out of use, some have survived the test of time. In Cheshire, for example, it is called Gethsemane, while in Somerset it is known as Adder’s Flower. Elsewhere in the country local botanists may recall names like Cuckoos, Regals, Bloody Man’s Fingers, Soldier’s Jackets, Kettle-cases and Dead-men’s-fingers. The latter epithet has led many to believe that Shakespeare’s ‘long purples’ are in fact Early Purple Orchids.
The Latin name for this species, Orchis mascula, makes reference to the robust testicular form of the plant’s tubers, storage organs on the roots that contains sugars produced during photosynthesis. The generic name Orchis literally means ‘testis’; however these paired tubers are not only found in Orchidaceae. For example, the Solanaceae family produce tubers that we are all familiar with: potatoes.
In Orchis, one of the two tubers will have survived from the previous winter, while the other is forming ready to sustain the plant during the next one. Before the arrival of tea and coffee in the 1700s, tubers from Orchis mascula were used to make a drink called salep, consumed across Europe from Turkey to Britain. Ground tubers were added to water which would then be sweetened and flavoured. The species is now endangered in Turkey, where the drink is still popular.
Beneath its beautiful exterior, the Early Purple Orchid is actually a dastardly trickster. The centre of the flower, where the pink fades into white, sports a set of small purple spots. These are thought to guide visiting insects towards the mouth of the spur, the structure containing nectar. And here’s where the deceit lies. The Early Purple Orchid doesn’t produce nectar. It cheats its pollinators into thinking they’re going to get a sweet, sugary meal and in doing so ensures its pollen gets stuck to the insect’s head.
An orchid’s pollen is attached to sticky structures called pollinia – thin stalks with fuzzy heads, which look a bit like miniature microphones. When an insect enters the flower, the pollinia adhere to its head and stand vertically, almost like small antennae. As the insect flies away an extraordinary change takes place: the stalks bend ninety degrees and lean forward, adopting a horizontal position. It is crucial that this occurs after the insect has left the first orchid, but before it arrives at the next one, because once the pollinia have adopted this stance they will come into contact with the stigma of the flower the insect visits first, which initiates pollination.
I finished photographing the Early Purples and collected my gear before rejoining the path. One orchid down, but I had yet to find the one I’d come in search of. I continued on made my way along the coast, walking beside a weather-beaten stone wall, burdened with ivy that bordered the edge of the field.
I strolled along, listening to unseen chiffchaffs and totting up a list of wildflowers in my notebook. Yellow cowslips, crosswort and the first bulbous buttercups of the year were followed by common vetch, salad burnet and hairy violets in various shades of pink, red and purple. All around me nature was busy: wrens whirred, bees bumbled and ferns unfurled.
The Early Spider Orchid, or Ophrys sphegodes, grows in very few places in the UK, only in scattered locations along the coast of Kent, Sussex and Dorset. Here, though, it often appears in the thousands. First recorded in 1650 by a Dr Bowle in Northamptonshire, this species has been one of the most adversely affected by agricultural intensification. By the 1800s, inland locations for this little orchid were already rare, with many populations extinct by the turn of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1950, J. E. Lousley laments the decline of sphegodes, conceding that ‘it is fairly safe to say that the last known localities were merely those which had dodged the plough longest’. As a consequence, the Early Spider has been lost from 73 per cent of its historical range and is now a Red Data Book species protected under Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981).
But not all change is bad. During work on the Channel Tunnel in Kent in the 1990s, the decision was made to place some five million cubic metres of chalk material excavated from under the sea at the foot of the cliffs around the entrance to the tunnel. Over the following years, the site was landscaped and opened as a nature reserve called Samphire Hoe. In 1998, Early Spider Orchids were discovered growing at the site, thought to have arrived by seed from the small population living on top of the cliffs. There are now an estimated 10,000 plants established on that short stretch of Kentish coastline, testimony to the opportunistic nature of orchids when suddenly presented with appropriate conditions – in this case the chalk.
Heading down into the scrub that ran along the top of the cliffs, I explored the grassy areas among the bushes. The small blue buds of chalk milkwort were swelling in clusters among the lemony bottle-brush flowers of fresh spring sedge. In one little clearing the bracken had begun to take over: everywhere I looked there were coiled croziers and fronds unfurling. In another, there were more Early Purple Orchids. The wind was almost non-existent here and I was hit by the glorious coconut fragrance of the gorse’s golden flowers. In an instant, I was eight years old again, clambering over rocks on the Devon coast path with my cousins.
Intent on finding the Early Spider, I emerged from the gorsy hollow and back out into the open. The path wove through a series of small hillocks, the hollows in between providing a safe sanctuary from the strong prevailing winds. The grass here was much shorter, nibbled to within an inch of its life by rabbits. Glancing to my left, I picked out the miniature profile of the species I’d come in search of. My glee at seeing a rare Early Spider Orchid made me grin from ear to ear; I even did a little dance.
I took out my camera and began taking photos. Early Spiders are exquisite little plants. Standing roughly six centimetres tall, the stem, sepals and petals are a vivid lime green which makes them easy to spot in the short turf. The central petal, or lip, of the flower is an exception. Supposedly resembling the legless body of a large spider, it is bigger than the other petals and a dark chocolatey brown. Scrawled across the middle is a pale, silvery-blue letter ‘H’ or ‘π’. As I looked closer, I noticed two round eyes gazing up at me and hairy haunches bristling in the wind. The Early Spider Orchid’s Latin name, Ophrys sphegodes, pays tribute to its ‘wasp-like’ nature. Former names like aranifera (Greek for ‘spider’) also relate to its appearance. Despite seeming spider-like to human eyes, it has evolved to attract the male solitary bee Andrena nigroaenea.
Early Spider Orchids are one of the four species of the genus Ophrys that can be regularly found growing in Britain, the others being Bee, Fly, Early Spider and Late Spider. Their flowers are remarkably insect-like and have a fascinating, yet diabolical sex life. While most plants attract pollinators with the promise of nectar, these orchids lure them in with the promise of bee sex. This deception is accomplished by imitating the scent, appearance and texture of virgin female bees.
A passing male bee senses the orchid from afar, drawn by the alluring female smells released by the plant. He’s delighted to find what he perceives to be a female resting on the flower, her head buried among the petals. Excited by this, he alights and attempts to mate with the ‘female’, often vigorously and for prolonged periods. During these fruitless exertions, the bee knocks into the column – the reproductive structure consisting of both male and female parts – which drops two tiny, sticky pollen sacs onto the bee’s back. Eventually, the bee gets frustrated by the lack of action and buzzes off in search of a more enthusiastic partner.
The sexual frustration of the bee is essential to the orchid’s scheme. In an ideal world, the pollen from one plant will be deposited on another to ensure a mixing of genes. Determined to avoid repeating his mistake, our male bee flies far away from the orchid and its neighbours. However, upon encountering another population, he immediately falls for the ruse all over again, this time depositing the pollen sacs on the new plant, elegantly ensuring sexual reproduction. The new orchid will smell, look and feel ever so slightly different. Not only does this make the bee think he’ll have more luck this time, but it also smartly prevents the bee from learning not to visit the orchid again.
Each one of these insect-mimicking orchid species has fine-tuned itself over evolutionary time so that it smells, looks and feels exactly like the female of a single pollinator species. It is an extraordinary fraud, entirely masterminded by a plant.
I got down on my stomach and lay still, eyes focused on the tiny orchids in front of me. With each gust of wind, the plants shivered and seemed to draw their spiders closer, clustering for warmth. Each one gazed into the distance and waited patiently for a passing Andrena bee. Wishful thinking, I thought, the afternoon too cold and blustery for insects.
I continued on my way, filled with a bouncy optimism and stopping in almost every little hollow to admire the little spiders quivering in the wind. By now I had reached the end of the nature reserve and was following the cliffs west towards Dancing Ledge. The coast path undulated, sloping down to accommodate small beaches and pebbled shores. Gulls squabbled in the air above me as I passed cascades of cowslips splashed with the pink of Early Purple Orchids.
Dancing Ledge is a small, disused limestone quarry at the base of the cliffs just south of Langton Matravers. Access to the ledge involves a short scramble down a steep path. The cliffs here are striped with beds of rock so even they look almost ruler-drawn. Here I found more Early Spider Orchids dotted in the turf like little green beacons.
Glancing around, a spike of pink caught my eye. Nestled in the grass were three orchids similar to the Early Purples I had seen earlier. These were different, though. They were stunted and the flowers were hooded by sepals with distinct parallel veins the dull green of an old copper coin. The petals, too, were darker in colour than the Early Purples, and the lip frilled around the edges. The leaves, which in Orchis mascula almost always have some spots, were completely unmarked.
These were Green-winged Orchids, Anacamptis morio.
My only past experience of the Green-winged Orchid had been several years earlier when I was fifteen. My father had just presided over the funeral of a man who had devoted his life to nurturing a colony of these orchids on his back lawn. Plans by the new owners to build a swimming pool in the garden meant the orchids were in grave danger. I had been invited by his widow to dig up as many plants as I wanted if I thought it would be possible to save them. They were, she said, his legacy.
A few days later, my father and I drove over to her house, equipped with spades and a large groundsheet, and dug up two square metres of turf full of Green-winged Orchids. My father suggested we transfer them to a corner of the churchyard. It was twilight by the time we arrived. Had anyone been passing the church at this late hour, they would have seen the vicar and his son lift a heavy tarpaulin out of the car and proceed to drag it across the graveyard, before digging in a discreet corner, then carefully lowering the tarpaulin into the ground. Imagine the gossip in the parish the next day.
The graveyard orchids flowered for the first few years, but have since dwindled in number, too disturbed by the change in conditions. But it was worth trying to save them. The Green-winged Orchid is declining with dramatic speed. Once a widespread, often common, component of hay meadows, it now only occurs in small isolated populations. Another victim of the plough, fertilisers and the decline of traditional hay meadow farming.
It is linked to the Early Purple by more than just appearance. In the sixteenth century, it was thought to be the female of the Early Purple. It was known as the Fool Stone and thought to be female because the ‘stones’, or tubers, are smaller than in the Early Purple Orchid, or Male Fool Stone. To this day, Green-winged and Early Purple Orchids share numerous local names, such as Bloody Man’s Finger, and Cuckoo-flower. Here in Dorset they are both known as Giddyganders.
I sat down, shielding myself against the wind and the first few spots of rain that swept in from the sea. In my first afternoon of hunting, I had seen the first three orchids of the year. They had been straightforward sightings, all orchids I had found in previous years, but nonetheless I felt delighted.
The species on my list that I had never seen before would no doubt prove a greater challenge.