‘Historically, the search for and acquisition of orchids has been one of the most manly of feats.’

Richard Leighton, Orchid Hunting in the Florida Everglades (2012)

Jersey
May 2013

Men who have a passion for plants have often been typecast as effeminate or gay. Why, though, is an interest in flowers deemed feminine? Surely botany is just another of the natural sciences. An interest in mountains, or indeed the bears that live on them, is hardly considered emasculating. I think we all have an innate connection to nature; it’s just that many of us aren’t aware of it and don’t tap into it. An appreciation of our wild world is a fundamental part of what it is to be human, regardless of one’s gender or sexual preference.

At the start of my next expedition, I had a long and unexpected conversation on these matters with a taxi driver in Jersey which got me thinking. Did people assume I was gay when I sheepishly outlined the challenge I’d set myself? As a nineteen-year-old who hadn’t been in a proper relationship before, I wasn’t exactly dispelling the notion. I didn’t want girls to mistake me for something I’m not, otherwise I’d never stand a chance.

I had come to the Channel Islands to find Loose-flowered Orchids: tall, pink, supermodel-like plants more often encountered in the Mediterranean than in Britain. As this orchid is no longer found growing naturally on the mainland, Jersey and Guernsey were my only options for seeing truly wild examples of it.

I’d touched down at Gatwick the night before, exhausted and slightly defeated by my time in Ireland. It was only as I walked over to baggage reclaim that I realised I’d forgotten to book a hotel at the airport. My connection to Jersey the following morning was too early for me to go home. I tried to find a hotel with a room, to no avail, and after one sad phone call with my mother, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would have to sit out the night in the airport.

Settling down on a seat overlooking the arrivals lounge with a coffee, a bag of foam banana sweets and my iPod, I began people watching. It seemed the world was arriving in London – thousands of people, Belizean, Japanese, Ethiopian, Latvian and Canadian. At around four, two armed policemen with the biggest guns I’d ever seen sauntered through our slumbering group. I tried my best to look nonchalant.

The night stretched on, until eventually the clock struck six and I made my way over to the departure gate. The next few hours passed in a blur. After our conversation, the taxi driver dropped me off at my B&B. I staggered up the steps with my luggage and headed to reception where Kerry, the owner, welcomed me as Lewis Borstadan, and wished me a pleasant time in Jersey.

Over the next few days, I explored Jersey, enjoying the beach and the top-floor suite I’d been upgraded to, giving the orchids a few more days to reach their peak. The Channel Islands are actually situated much closer to the coast of France than to Britain. Technically British Crown dependencies rather than part of Britain per se, they’re made up of seven permanently inhabited islands: Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou and Brecqhou. Puzzle-piece shaped, Jersey is the largest of all the islands and is renowned for its sweeping clifftop views, cultural history and picturesque seaside towns.

Each morning, I piled heaven-sent scrambled egg onto my plate in preparation for hours of exploration. Once, Kerry walked past while I had an extremely large mouthful of egg and bacon and trilled: ‘Morning, Lewis, I hope you slept well!’ With a name like Leif, I’d had a lifetime of being called all sorts of things: Leaf, Life, Layif. My parents have had conversations with people who are unable to believe the coincidence that their son Leaf is so interested in plants. I was even called Loaf once. Lewis, however, was not on the list.

I started to look around the island: I visited Elizabeth Castle, a sixteenth-century fortress cut off from the capital St Helier by the tide twice a day; I took long walks along panoramic beaches at St Brelade’s Bay and St Aubin; and explored the rocky coastal paths leading to sheltered, secluded coves. I hired a bike from the B&B and cycled further afield, battling the steep roads up from the coast without any gears. I passed fields of tan-brown Jersey cattle, stopping to stroke their friendly, inquisitive muzzles. Before the turn of the nineteenth century, cows would be offered as dowry for marriages between Guernsey and Jersey islanders.

When the time came to go in search of Loose-flowered Orchids, I had relaxed into life on Jersey and had familiarised myself with the coastline. I took the bike out and pedalled up a windy lane to the top of the cliffs. Tiny purple-and-yellow snapdragon flowers of ivy-leaved toadflax tumbled from crevices in the old walls.

In the Channel Islands, the Loose-flowered Orchid is a plant of boggy pastures and water meadows. It was first recorded on Jersey by C. C. Babington in 1837. While also present on Guernsey, it is inexplicably absent from the other islands in the group. There are plenty of historical accounts of its wide distribution across both Jersey and Guernsey. E.D. Marquand, upon visiting north-west Guernsey in 1901, reported that ‘at the beginning of June the fields are quite purple with these beautiful flowers’; other plant hunters in the same period reported that at times it was almost impossible to walk without trampling them. Drainage, development and a shift in agricultural methods have been catastrophic for populations, with many just a fraction of their former selves. If it hadn’t been for a significant conservation effort from the Jersey National Trust, we may have lost this species altogether.

Jersey is a maze of so-called Green Lanes – roads prioritised for pedestrians and cyclists. And it seemed to me, as I pedalled along, that without the smog of exhaust fumes and perpetual traffic jams, nature had taken control. Every nook and cranny in the crumbling stone walls was overflowing with small polypody ferns, herb-robert, stonecrops and ghostly green navelwort. Some were awash with Mexican fleabane, a dainty garden escapee, while others were full of lichens: crimson goblets and ragged wizard-beards. Orange-tip butterflies were zigzagging up and down the roads, passing from garlic mustard to three-cornered garlic and back again.

I sped down the hill towards the marshland behind the dunes in Les Mielles Nature Reserve, a yellow blur of gorse whizzing past on both sides. The lanes periodically passed through small hamlets with stalls and honesty boxes offering freshly dug Jersey Royal potatoes. I was ticking off stereotypes faster than orchids.

Passenger planes drifted overhead into the airport as I skidded to a halt outside the entrance to Le Noir Pré, known locally as the Orchid Field. Purchased by the Jersey National Trust in 1972 on the recommendation of Frances Le Sueur, a distinguished local botanist, Le Noir Pré had been one of many meadows under threat of ploughing for potato crops.

Le Noir Pré is actually made up of two fields, both damp and with a sea of reeds in their centre. That day they were speckled yellow with buttercups, the white umbels of hemlock water-dropwort lined the edges, almost masking the sign next to the gate that read ‘Keep out – reserve open on the 26th May onwards’. It was 25th May. But I hadn’t come all this way to be kept out by a sign. After a quick glance around, I scaled the gate and jumped down on the other side.

I spent the next hour and a half in among a huge colony of Loose-flowered Orchids. All around me rose lofty spikes with rich, velvety purple flowers, each with a sharply folded lip and rabbit-ear sepals held aloft. They looked like stretched-out Early Purple Orchids, but more spectacular. Le Noir Pré was a catwalk for these supermodel orchids. Dressed in a royal magenta, they practically strutted. The Latin species name, laxiflora, provides a fitting description of the way this sparsely arranged inflorescence rises tall and stately from the surrounding vegetation.

While Loose-flowered is an apt description of this plant, it is also known by various other names: locally it is the Jersey Orchid, and in France ‘des pentecôtes’, a reference to its time of flowering. I texted my parents to tell them I’d found the Pentecost Orchid and my father replied: ‘It’s a week late!’

I hadn’t expected to find such a profusion. According to Babington, this was a common scene in the nineteenth century, as it was found in ‘almost every wet meadow and bog’ in Jersey and Guernsey. Aside from a small but thriving population in Sussex, introduced using seeds collected in Crete, there are sparse records of laxiflora in mainland Britain. Weirdly, most are from County Durham in the late 1800s.

Five minutes of walking around the meadow and I had spotted the slightly softer pink of three Southern Marsh Orchids. Each spike was densely packed with buds that were mostly still planning and scheming. Beneath each bud protruded a thin, pointed leaf-like structure called a bract, making the plant look like a green mace. The saucer-like lips of the few flowers that had opened were still crinkled, like the rumpled wings of a freshly emerged butterfly. They were disconcertingly early. Normally I would expect them to blossom in the middle of June. But I was in Jersey, I reminded myself, considerably further south than the Wiltshire countryside I was accustomed to.

Overlooked until the early twentieth century, the Southern Marsh Orchid was named Dactylorhiza praetermissa by G. C. Druce in 1914. Since then it has been widely recognised as the commonest marsh orchid in the south of England. In his landmark work Wild Orchids of Britain in 1951, V. S. Summerhayes, curator of the orchid herbarium at Kew Gardens for thirty-nine years, notes that it can be found growing in a ‘variety of wet places, damp meadows, water meadows, lowland peat-bogs, fens, and marshes among sand dunes’.

As the breeze dropped and the heady fragrance of orchids filled the air, I paused, struck by the mood fashioned by the intense colour of the colony: not spring, but decadent midsummer; the romantic, hopeful flush of pleasure associated with pink. Loose-flowered and Southern Marsh Orchids blended into the blush of red campion, dog-rose and ragged-robin, as well as crane’s-bills and stork’s-bills, vetches and pimpernels, all displaying their own unique shades of pinks and reds.

After Le Noir Pré, I spent a couple of hours exploring the fields surrounding St Ouen’s Pond. I found more Loose-flowered Orchids there, their deep-purple flowers contrasting with the pure white of common star-of-bethlehem. As I crossed to the drier ground, I found spring sandwort and, much to my delight, the fluffy lilac bobs of hare’s-tail grass. Overhead a marsh harrier was keening, circling the pond and surrounding reed beds. I followed its shadow as it passed, a black silhouette against a bright floral background.

A bit further on and there was my third new species of the day: Common Spotted Orchids. Like the marsh orchids, they were very early – I was used to seeing these hit their peak around the summer solstice back home – and there were droves of them. Their waxy leaves are splattered with purple, and their flowers are pale fuchsia, with lilac loops and cryptic squiggles, as if telling a story. I kept my distance: get too close and they’re hypnotic.

I jumped back on my bike and cycled towards the sea, passing a long ditch of Loose-flowered Orchids. They were certainly the most southerly orchids I would find this year. The Channel Islands have played host to several other orchids in the past that haven’t yet established themselves on the British mainland. Tongue Orchids, of the genus Serapias, are Mediterranean in origin but occasionally turn up on the Channel Islands. They are pale grey with reddish streaks and a flat auburn tongue of a petal. They supposedly attract pollinators by mimicking little insect burrows.

The name Serapias is derived from Serapis, a composite Graeco-Egyptian god uniting the sacred bull Apis with Osiris, ruler of the underworld. His orgiastic cult inspired the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides to give the name Serapias to an aphrodisiacal orchid, which was later applied to the genus by Linnaeus in 1753.

Until the late 1980s, there were no records at all of these species in the UK, but in 1989 two spikes of Small-flowered Tongue Orchid were found on the coast of Cornwall. Since then, numbers have oscillated between zero and five each year. It’s unknown whether they were established as a result of wind-blown seed or deliberately introduced by a local orchid fanatic. But the fact they survived and flowered suggests global warming may already be having an effect on the range of orchid species. Might we see an influx of new species over the course of the next century? Will sightings of Small-flowered Tongue Orchid become more frequent?

I arrived at the beach, locked my bike to a railing and climbed a dune through swathes of thrift and sea campion. At the top, I had a wide-angled, unadulterated view of a crisp, docile sea, its shallow waves reflecting the sun in rhythmic pulses. Down on the shoreline, three wading birds were picking their way along the beach, acting in tandem with the water and rushing to safer ground with every swell and surge. A light breeze caused tiny grains of sand to swarm across the path before settling among the marram at my feet. The smell of salt was left hanging in the air.

After a long, refreshing swim in the sea, I returned to the dunes. I had really been in my element in the fields with the Loose-flowered Orchids. This was an ungendered obsession: with the natural world, with orchids, with nature in its purest form.