‘There must be grazing overhead, hazel thickets,
Pavements the rain is dissolving, springs and graves,
Darkness above the darkness of the seepage of souls
And hedges where goosegrass spills its creamy stars.’
Michael Longley, In Aillwee Cave (1991)
Ireland
May 2013
Bleak, cold and barren are probably not adjectives one would associate with the environments typically graced by orchids. Our image of them tends to lead us rather to hothouses or tropical rainforests, something compounded by the numerous stories of Victorian plant hunters and their adventures in the jungle. The west coast of Ireland is far from our expectations: rugged, austere and, more often than not, rainy.
The success at Durlston, now several days behind me, brought renewed confidence as I finalised my plans for the week ahead. I was quickly realising that the dynamic nature of the flowering season would put my carefully laid plans out of kilter. A certain amount of adaptability would be required in order to find the remaining forty-nine species. My next planned target had been the Lady Orchid, but the late season had heavily delayed the plants down in Kent. It would be another week before they started to flower. Instead, I decided to head west, to Ireland, to hunt down the two May orchids that can’t be found in Britain: Dense-flowered and Irish Marsh Orchids.
Over the winter, I’d spent a long time discussing my plans with my godfather, Michael. He is a kind-hearted, spirited man with a laugh that echoes around the room long after he has left. A loudly spoken Geordie, forever amused by life’s great ironies, Michael was a Roman Catholic priest for forty years in Yorkshire. When not presiding, he is invariably dressed in a brightly coloured cashmere jumper and beige corduroys, and can be found smuggling mint imperials between meals despite the warnings from his doctor. Seeing this as a perfect opportunity to spend time together, we hatched a plan to visit Ireland in the spring.
Michael met me at Shannon airport just outside Limerick. I’d flown from Gatwick on a crammed Ryanair jet absorbed in my book about the Burren.
We drove for an hour and a half, eventually leaving the motorway and well-manicured A-roads for the rough country lanes that took us towards the small town of Ballybunion, famous for its golf courses and wide sandy beaches. We passed a series of chalked slates advertising small bags of salted periwinkles for sale and hot seaweed baths. In the centre of town stood a statue of Bill Clinton playing golf.
We bounced up a pot-holed hillside and ground to a halt in the grass outside a boxy, weather-beaten cottage. Its thick stone walls were pale peach, the paintwork chipped and peeling. Net curtains hung limply in the grubby windows and the slanting roof was simply a large sheet of corrugated iron. I was not convinced. But like a perfect metaphor, the inside was an entirely different story: a cosily lit living room, the air warm from the peat fire which was flickering softly in the burner. Pale pine panels striped the walls. After the long journey, it was sweet relief to slump into one of the squashy sofas.
My first target was the Irish Marsh Orchid, one of the species I’d never seen before. I’d spent some time on the plane trying to memorise the intricate pattern of wiggles and squiggles found on the flower, as well as various other identifiable characteristics. I wanted to be sure I knew what it was when I found one. The marsh orchids are notoriously difficult to identify. Not only are they very similar, but also extremely variable both within and between populations. On top of this, the different species will readily cross with one another, producing a series of hybrid offspring with intermediate characters. In other words, the marsh orchids are still rapidly evolving.
The west coast of Ireland is an indomitable, stalwart landscape stretching from the county of Donegal in the north, down through Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Limerick and Clare, eventually reaching the rain-lashed shores of Kerry, where we were. I got the impression that the lush green pastures hadn’t changed for centuries. This is a corner of Ireland infused with wildness, and life here moves at a slow, rhythmic pace.
My first few days were spent exploring the quiet towns and tiny hamlets dotted along the wind-whipped coast. We visited the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged thumb of land that protrudes into the North Atlantic whose tip is the mainland’s most westerly point. Dominated by the dark peaks of Mount Brandon, this beautiful, jagged landscape is a hotchpotch of early Christian chapels, holy wells, idyllic villages, prehistoric ring forts and ancient beehive huts, all woven together by an intricate network of narrow country lanes.
The cliffs, battered by the wind and waves were slowly crumbling into the ocean. Sheep, painted pink and turquoise, lurking around every corner, sheltered under the rocky ledges by the side of the road. Ahead of us emerald fields, glistening with recent rain, within an irregular mesh of dry stone walls, swept down to the sea.
We stopped for a stroll and some tea and banana cake in the pretty town of Dingle. Too early for the school holidays, it was fairly quiet and we quickly adopted this routine in each town we passed through. I jigged down the street to the sound of traditional Irish music, much to Michael’s amusement, past tiny idiosyncratic shops filled with local pottery, honey and herbal tea.
Just like my parents, Michael loved to visit churches – provided they were a long way from his former parishes – and so we paused briefly in Dingle’s St Mary’s church. When I was a child, our family holidays to the Lake District, Yorkshire and Northumberland were never complete without visiting a long line of local churches. Just as I drew up lists of rare plants to go and see, my parents would earmark parishes with famous, tumbledown chapels and age-old oratories. While my parents prayed, my sisters and I obeyed the unwritten rule of stoic, sombre silence. We wandered slowly between pews and pillars, browsing last year’s Christmas cards still on sale. My favourite part of these visits was the stained-glass windows: I find the glint and twinkle of the multicoloured panes of glass strangely hypnotic. One window in a dilapidated church hidden in the folds of the Yorkshire Dales has an orchid, the mythical Lady’s Slipper, glimmering gold and burgundy.
Back on the road, Michael and I drove right to the end of the peninsula. The sun had firmly established itself and we pulled over to take photos of the surrounding scenery: an incredibly blue sky above a glittering Atlantic Ocean, isolated islands and crumbling cliffs.
At one point the road verged on a small marshy area and my eyes were drawn to a plant with an inflorescence packed with small pink flowers growing beside a mirror-like pool of water. It was an orchid. An Irish Marsh Orchid? It couldn’t be; it was the middle of May and according to my books that would be early in a normal season, let alone a late one.
I jumped down from the roadside and landed among the rushes. The plant was still tightly in bud with the exception of a single floret. Bending down, I lifted the lip of the flower with my finger in order to inspect the loopy patterns so characteristic of the genus Dactylorhiza. It was certainly a marsh orchid, and my fourth species of the year, but I couldn’t tell which one. Of all our native species, the dactyl – or marsh – orchids, named after the finger-like projections in their root system, are among the most difficult to identify. Not only is each species extremely variable, but they have an annoying tendency to hybridise given the smallest opportunity. The resulting plethora of intermediate hybrids makes it so difficult to tell parent from child that many botanists around the country have completely given up on them.
The plant I had on the Dingle Peninsula was particularly puzzling. It didn’t help that it was the first one I’d seen since the previous summer. I consulted my go-to guide on British orchids, by Anne and Simon Harrap, and immediately found a good place to start. Ireland is host to only four species of marsh orchid: Northern, Pugsley’s, Early and Irish. It was far too early in the season for the first pair so I was already down to two species. Reading the descriptions in Harrap, it seemed relatively easy to distinguish them. Irish Marsh is generally darker, with a broad three-lobed lip patterned with deep-purple double loops; Early Marsh Orchids usually have paler flowers and a very pinched lip. The key difference, it seemed, was that the Early Marsh held its sepals aloft, like a celebratory sports fan, rather than horizontally. I glanced down at the sepals which were held at 45 degrees: not quite celebratory but not exactly unhappy either. Typical.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make my mind up. I took as many photos as possible, focusing on the intricate spotted markings on the lip, and sent them to Steve Povey, a fellow botanist and orchid specialist. I was probably just being a bit slow after months out of practice, but I felt sure Steve could help me out.
Satisfied with the sighting, although frustrated at my rusty identification skills, we set off again around the peninsula, stopping only to visit the 2000-year-old beehive hut settlements – little igloos of stone dotted across the hillside.
The next couple of days were spent in and out of the cottage, alternating between deep conversation and contented silence. Michael was curious about what it had been like for me growing up with two vicars for parents. It was certainly an unusual situation. My parents were not only involved in the church, but in my schools too, so all my friends knew who they were. My father would come in once a week to give assemblies at my primary school and I would dutifully listen to every word he had to say as if he were no different from all the other teachers. As I got older, it became harder. During my entire secondary education, my mother was the school chaplain. Around my GCSEs, I went through a period of intense mortification whenever she stood up to give a talk to the whole school.
To my parents’ immense credit, they’ve always assured me I could make my own decision about whether to share their beliefs. They were never pushy, and never tried to make me believe anything I didn’t want to. Instead, I’ve grown up with all the support I needed to pursue my own interests. Michael, too, had always shared this attitude and, rather than plying me with religious gifts, had always taken great pleasure in buying me the latest Harry Potter book. I let on less than he’d have liked about my personal beliefs in our conversations, though; I was still finding my feet in a world where sharing came less than naturally.
Michael was in a jovial mood as we set off on Saturday morning to tour the Ring of Kerry, the next peninsula south of Dingle, as finger-like as the roots of the dactylorchids. The views from the mountains here were breath-taking; I didn’t know where to look. The roadside was lined with Irish spurge, St Patrick’s cabbage and the occasional Early Purple Orchid on the old stone walls. Yellowing tussocks of grass grew within the birch and alder carr that lined the loughs at the bottom of the valley, and I was so busy admiring everything from the window that, for the first time I can remember, I completely forgot about taking photographs.
When we returned to Ballybunion, I took advantage of a beautiful evening to walk up the road and onto the moor at the top of the hill. It wasn’t long before I was exploring the high grassy banks on either side of me; dog-violets were abundant but not much else was in flower. A cuckoo called in the distance, the first of the year. A gentle breeze swept across the moorland, rustling the brown skeletons of last year’s bracken. Pipits skipped from post to post, always staying a few metres ahead of me. After a few minutes, I found a hole in the fence. It gaped invitingly, and boggy pools full of sedges enticed me to enter. I glanced back down the lane, then slipped through into the field. And there right in front of me was another marsh orchid, growing at a bizarre angle halfway up the vertical bank.
Fantastic, I thought, as I squelched my way over, this time I would be able to confidently identify my fourth species of the year. My first thought was how different it looked from the one I had found earlier in the week. This orchid had paler, pinker flowers and the lip was more pinched. Disappointment and frustration met my excitement head on. The flowers were too pale for Irish Marsh Orchid and yet they had rich purple tinsel trails on the lip and a few small spots on the leaves. Their sepals were almost horizontal. A local variety of Irish Marsh perhaps? I couldn’t be sure. Further exploration resulted in two more plants, both with the same pallid flowers and heavy markings. Once more I had failed to identify a species in situ, and would have to rely on a more expert opinion.
On returning to the cottage, I found a reply from Steve about my marsh orchid on the Dingle Peninsula. His puzzled comments made me feel better. Unable to come to any conclusion, he offered to send my photos to orchid geneticists at Kew Gardens. Jumping at this fantastic opportunity, I almost missed his parting comment: ‘the praetermissa-type lip is most interesting, considering that species is not found in Ireland.’ Praetermissa refers to the Southern Marsh Orchid, a species I had originally dismissed upon reading that it wasn’t found in Ireland.
A sudden excitement gripped me. Could I really have just discovered a Southern Marsh Orchid in Ireland? Then another thought quickly brought me back down to earth. This couldn’t be a Southern Marsh Orchid, a species which would ordinarily flower in early June; this plant was coming into flower in mid-May during a spring that had only just got started. And yet… the shape of the lip, the colour of the flowers and the vague fine-spotted markings all looked like praetermissa.
When I told Michael this, he wisely remarked: ‘We are so often reminded that we know so little of life.’ There was always a chance this could be a new species for Ireland. I replied to Steve with a simple message and attached the photos of the other marsh orchids I had found on the hillside, in the hope that he could shed some light on these as well.
The Burren rises, lunar and desolate, in the north of County Clare. On the surface it appears to be nothing more than a barren sea of pale limestone, banded with shale and clay, earning it the Gaelic name boireann, meaning ‘rocky place’. During the last ice age, monstrous glaciers scraped away the soil, leaving behind a bare bed of scarred limestone. Since then, rainwater has exploited the fissures and cracks already present in the rock, eroding away small channels, transforming the limestone pavement into a criss-crossing network of broad flat blocks, called clints, and deep vertical fissures, known as grykes.
The Burren is an enigma. It was described by one of Cromwell’s officers as a ‘savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor wood enough to burn a man, nor soil enough to bury a man’. However, the grykes, fissures, shelves and clandestine pockets of the rock are abounding with plant life.
It isn’t the abundance of plants that makes the Burren unique, but its floral peculiarities. Alpine, Arctic and Mediterranean plants bloom side by side throughout the national park. Maidenhair fern, usually found in warmer climates, can be found growing next to spring gentians, normally associated with high-altitude alpine meadows; the Dense-flowered Orchid, common on the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and Italy, flowers among swathes of mountain avens. The Burren is a botanical oxymoron made possible by the combination of the perfectly placed Gulf Stream and limestone’s ocean-like ability to absorb heat during the summer months and then let it go over the winter. For a botanist, it is like Christmas and birthday rolled into one.
The spectacular views of the Ring of Kerry were still firmly imprinted on my mind as we set off early on the Monday for the ferry across the River Shannon. I was nervous. This was my one day in the Burren; my one day to find the Dense-flowered Orchid. Without it, I would have made a wasted trip – and, I felt, let Michael down.
I was armed with a list of sites from Sharon Parr, a plant recorder for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, or BSBI for short. Welcoming and brimming with expertise, the BSBI is a charity run by volunteers who carefully record and map what’s growing where and when in their local areas. The data they collect underpins the conservation of our native plants. Sharon is in charge of collating all the records for County Clare, which means her knowledge of the Burren extends down every track and gulley. If anyone knows how to find a Dense-flowered Orchid, it is Sharon.
It was an overcast, humid day. The rocky landscape perfectly matched the sky above: pewter, all-encompassing and unpredictable. We rounded a bend, narrowly avoiding a hare as it pelted across the road, to find a vast expanse of water shining pale blue. This was Lough Bunny. Clints and grykes in the limestone ran into the choppy waters of the lough. In the distance, the escarpment rose sharply into the mountainous crag of Mullagh More.
There were plants everywhere. Every crack in the limestone was sprouting green. Common bird’s-foot trefoil, rue-leaved saxifrage, heath dog-violets, milkworts and hawthorn. The snowy-white flowers of mountain everlasting sprang from the pavement, spring gentians bejewelled the grass with an electric blue, and I was left speechless by the sheer number of Early Purple Orchids. There were thousands of them, speckling the slope.
Lying down on my stomach, I gazed greedily into a deep crevice and encountered a miniature jungle. Hundreds of plants thronged every crack and root-hold. There were plantains, crane’s-bills, ferns, trefoils and saxifrages. Mosses and liverworts encased the smooth limestone, tiny sporophytic stalks peering upwards like periscopes. They grew over and under one another making it difficult to distinguish one plant from the next. This was chaotic, unadulterated wilderness.
‘You seem to be enjoying yourself,’ Michael mused, a smile spreading across his face. I was so absorbed in the abundance of species I hadn’t heard him approaching. I told him that I could spend days here, weeks even. One day, eight years previously, Michael had given me a gift which had completely changed the way I observed the natural world – the camera now in my hands. For the first time he was watching me in my element.
I clambered over to a coarse lump of limestone sticking out between two bushes. Over the centuries, the rain had slowly worked away at its soluble surface, dissolving and shaping it until a hole had opened up right through the stone. This round, jagged circle in the rock provided a window for meadow vetchling, bloody crane’s-bill and spring gentians. Under the nest of grasses, mosses and black lichens, a long line of ants was marching to cover: single file and military. It was like looking through a portal into a secret world.
After this excellent introduction to the Burren, we decided to move closer to Mullagh More to hunt for Dense-flowered Orchids, Neotinea maculata. Prominent and enduring, the softly slanting beds of Mullagh More’s limestone are iconic, the Burren’s picture postcard. I picked my way across the escarpment towards the foot of the hill. With limestone, I quickly realised, you have to submit to the guidance of the grykes, the pitfall traps in the rock, and resist the impulse to wander off in arbitrary directions. The geology of the landscape determined when we turned, when we had to double back on ourselves, and whether or not we were permitted to cross onto unchartered pavements.
These hills and escarpments have hosted some of the great Irish botanists of the nineteenth century: Robert Lloyd Praeger, Ellen Hutchins, Frederick Foot and William Henry Harvey. But perhaps none so famous as Burren-born Patrick Bernard Kelly.
Kelly was a giant of a man with a thick, bushy beard and a pair of dustbin-lid hands. Fond of a pint of ale and a rich rabbit stew, Kelly was about as Irish as they come. Born in the Burren, he spent his childhood walking the hills and teaching himself botany through the observations he made in the field. By the end of the century, he had developed a name for himself as Dr P. B. O’Kelly, botanist and plant nurseryman. O’Kelly is responsible for much of what is known about the Burren’s flora today, and in recognition of this his name has been immortalised: Dactylorhiza fuchsii var. okellyi, or O’Kelly’s Spotted Orchid, is a white-flowered variety of Common Spotted Orchid.
O’Kelly welcomed famous botanists from across the country and guided them around the Burren. George Claridge Druce from Oxford University paid a visit; so did Robert Lloyd Praeger and Henry Levinge.
In the early 1900s, O’Kelly’s nursery business grew rapidly. He published advertisements in horticulture magazines for some of the Burren’s most unique wildflowers: spring gentians, grass-of-parnassus, large-flowered butterwort and pyramidal bugle. Orchids sold quickly. Two-and-six-pence for a Bee Orchid; his very own O’Kelly’s Spotted Orchid went for three shillings; while the Dense-flowered Orchid – the species I was looking for – raised one-and-six-pence.
He continued dealing in plants until he was well into his eighties. When he died in 1937, he was buried near his home in Ballyvaughan, surrounded by the Burren hills where, every summer, his white orchid blooms, a wonderful memorial of his life.
Michael leaned on his walking stick and watched as I darted around, hurriedly photographing hundreds of spring plants. Many of them were new to me, all of them were utterly fascinating. Coppery, crinkle-cut fronds of rustyback fern overflowed from the shallower grykes, occasionally joined by the deep pink of bloody crane’s-bill, a Burren speciality. A wider, grassier stretch of the path brought hairy rock-cress and round-leaved crane’s-bill. I was rushing, though. Neither orchid I wished to see had shown up, and I was beginning to feel slightly guilty that I’d brought Michael all the way out here.
That afternoon, after a series of worrying dead-ends, we crested a hill to the sight of another lough. This one wasn’t marked on my map: it was a turlough – a temporary lake that forms after periods of heavy rain, when the water table rises so high it breaches the limestone – and my final chance to see the Dense-flowered Orchid.
A rocky path, laden with spongy peat, twisted between huge glacial erratics deposited at random at the end of the last ice age. Some of these boulders were as big as Michael’s car. It was humbling to imagine the forces of nature that had warped this terrain into the landscape laid before us.
I passed through a narrow gap in an old stone wall and was rewarded with a little grassy knoll that perfectly matched the description I had in my hand. Eagerly, I set about searching the short turf. The hillock was a mosaic of colour: bright-lemon tormentil, Early Purple Orchids, a cloud of mountain avens and spring gentians, sown like sapphires into the sward. But no Neotinea.
Frustration flooded through me.
As we continued across the Burren, stopping now and then to investigate lough shores and mossy walls, the quantity of Early Purple Orchids continued to amaze me. I had never seen so many orchids in one day, in one place, and yet no matter how hard I looked, I still couldn’t find my little Neotinea.
I resorted to dropping in at a couple of information centres in Corofin and Kilfenora, but when I enquired about Dense-flowered Orchids, they all looked mystified and proceeded to tell me about where to see Early Purples. I was searching for too niche a plant.
In my desperation, I called Sharon Parr, willing her to pick up the phone. If she was out botanising, there would be only a slim chance of her having a signal. Six rings. Then a man answered. Unsure whether or not I had heard properly, I asked if it was Sharon. The voice on the other end of the phone said yes. Quickly covering my surprise, I adopted the manner of someone who knew that men could be called Sharon and briefly explained my predicament. He, for I was convinced Sharon was a ‘he’, directed me to various places on the north-west coast where there had been recent reports of Neotinea in flower.
I ended the call, grateful for the information but somewhat bemused. Perhaps Sharon was a unisex name in Ireland. It seemed like it could be a very Irish thing to do, call your son Sharon. So I accepted it and we drove on. Michael’s patience and understanding that day were immense. A relaxing venture into the Burren to see a couple of new orchids had rapidly turned into a wild-goose chase across the whole of Clare, a drive of heroic standards for an arthritic seventy-year-old.
We eventually arrived at the coast, but the sites Sharon had dictated hurriedly over the phone proved difficult to find. At the lighthouse near Ballyvaughan, Patrick O’Kelly’s old hunting ground, I searched meticulously among the small boulders and smoothed patches of limestone. More spring gentians and some bright Irish saxifrage, but not what I was looking for. I was bitter and disheartened. I’d found everything I’d hoped for except the two orchids I had specifically come to see.
Four hours later, we sat watching the sun set softly over the river back in Ballybunion. I checked my email and found a reply from Steve: the orchids I had sent him were a variety of Irish Marsh called kerryensis which was known to grow on the south-west coast of Ireland and have paler flowers and unspotted leaves. An unusual variety, but they were still Irish Marsh Orchids; they still counted. The Dense-flowered Orchid, however, I had failed to find, which meant I would have to come back to the Burren to avoid failing in my venture. Another flight, and more time away from orchids in England.
I spent the last couple of days with Michael recovering from our adventure in the Burren. We visited the pretty village of Adare, with its quaint streets, medieval monasteries and thatched cottages; we got stuck for an hour in Listowel while waiting for stragglers in an awfully managed cycling event, leaving Michael wondering ‘what the hell goes through Irish heads’; and we spent a lot of time lounging around in front of the TV in the cottage, laughing at the contestants competing in the Eurovision song contest.
On my final evening, we went down to the cliffs near Ballybunion and watched fulmars swoop and circle, seemingly just for fun, and choughs that pierced the quiet with sharp cries as they arrowed past. A light breeze carried the sound of waves crashing against the rocks far below as we ambled slowly along the cliff.
As we walked, Michael broached a topic we had so far avoided: my love life. ‘So do your girlfriends know about this orchid thing?’ he pried, eyes twinkling mischievously. I sighed. I was about as near to having a girlfriend as we’d been to finding Dense-flowered Orchids. Attractive, orchid-inclined girls are hard to come by.
Throughout my time at school I’d been constantly worried that the girls I fancied would find out about my botanising. I felt certain I would be ridiculed for it and as a result would never have a chance with any of them. If any of them found out it would be torturously embarrassing.
Spying a promising area of reeds in the adjacent field, I took advantage of a broken wire fence to escape the uncomfortable conversation. I scurried over, hoping to spring another, more convincing Irish Marsh Orchid. Pond water-crowfoot ran rampantly across the dry, hoof-trampled ground. As I got down on my knees to look more closely, a flash of pink caught the corner of my eye, but it was only another kerryensis marsh orchid. I desperately wanted to see a typical one.
On the verge of giving up, reassuring myself that I would probably see one if I returned to the Burren, I walked the last ditch back to the car. Halfway down, I stopped and smiled. There, in a warm, sheltered hollow, was the glorious deep pink of a fully flowering Irish Marsh Orchid. Its petals were smooth and velvety; the colours unphotographably vibrant. Equally satisfying was the ease with which I had been able to identify it, pure and unambiguous.
I returned to the car where Michael sat waiting for me. He took one look and a smile spread across his face. ‘What have you seen?’ he said. I explained, sharing the joy I’d felt at finding that perfect Irish Marsh Orchid. The disappointment of the previous day seemed a long way away.
Michael drove me to the airport the following morning. I remember talking to him about the book I wanted to write about my orchid hunt; I asked him if, when the time came, he would be willing to proofread some of my chapters. His face glowed with delight.
Upon arriving at Shannon airport, he waved me off, leaning on his walking stick and standing out from the crowd in his bright-purple jumper. I didn’t know it then, but that was the last time I ever saw Michael. He passed away the following year, and I cannot express how grateful I am for that week in Ireland with him. This chapter is a dedication to him, and the time we spent together.