‘Many of the British species give an odd impression of hardly belonging to the vegetable kingdom at all; like some of the lowest forms of microscopic life, they seem to exist on the borderland between the plant and animal worlds.’
Jocelyn Brooke, The Wild Orchids of Britain (1950)
Hampshire and Wiltshire
June 2013
The flinted track slalomed down from the crest of the hill like a ski run of fine chalk.
Martin Down stretched out before me, a wide sweep of unspoiled chalk downland made up of rolling meadows and skulking scrub. In the distance, a marshmallow sky of cumulus was puffing up on the horizon, glowing pink in the evening sunshine.
I’d come to Martin Down to hunt down an elusive chalk grassland specialist: the Burnt Orchid, Neotinea ustulata. Its little spikes of white flowers come wrapped up in wine-red buds, giving the tip of the plant a scorched look. If you find one you know you’re in a special place as it’s notorious for growing only in the oldest, most species-rich downland.
I’d tried and failed to find Burnt Orchids once before. The Friday after I’d returned to England from the Burren, my parents both had the day off so I’d driven us out to Clearbury Ring, just south of Salisbury. Overlooking the Avon valley, Clearbury is an Iron Age hillfort high up on the Wiltshire downs. Despite the altitude the morning was hot and clammy. My mother had pointed out that it was unheard of to have to wait until the very last day of May to get a proper May Day.
The day before had been wet and the clay soil of the arable field we’d walked along was soggy, squelching under our feet; the air was thick and humid. The hedges were sprinkled with snowy-white hawthorn and the rosy pink of dog-roses. They were lush and bushy, bulging with the new growth of spring. I was excited: this was the first orchid hunt of the year on my home turf.
The downland was booby-trapped with rabbit holes, each one guarded by a troop of purple thistles. We made our way through the grasses, eagerly anticipating little red-and-white spikes. But the further we went, the less likely it seemed we were going to find any; the grassland we were walking through was too species-poor. There were no iconic chalk grassland plants to be seen. Instead, the grass was filled with fluffy clovers, medicks and a clumpy grass called cock’s-foot.
Calcareous grassland occurs on shallow, nutrient-poor soil on a bedrock of limestone, usually chalk. The soil is infused with calcium. It’s famous not only for its wildlife but also for the White Horses carved into hillsides across the south of England. Chalk is a porous rock, so rainwater drains away very quickly and as a result the overlying grassland is usually very dry. It is a harsh environment for a single species to be able to dominate. As a result, it plays host to a multitude of different species. Typically found on valley slopes, it also develops in abandoned quarries, along roadside verges and railways generally across the south of England from Dorset to Kent and north into the Chilterns and Cotswolds.
One of the most biodiverse habitats in Europe, one square metre of chalk grassland can hold up to forty species of flowering plant. It’s even been referred to as the temperate equivalent of tropical rainforest. Here in Britain, it supports a vast array of wildflowers, many of which can’t be found anywhere else. This follows for insects too: Duke of Burgundy and Adonis blue butterflies, for example. Orchids, like many chalk specialists, have spent centuries adapting to this nutrient-poor environment. They survive in competition with equals.
Grasslands have been around for thousands of years. In Britain, they’ve been unintentionally encouraged by woodland clearance by humans and the grazing of wild animals. The practice of grazing livestock has shaped our wildflower-rich grasslands over the centuries, and its decline has played a significant role in the disappearance of much of our chalk grassland since the Second World War. Most wildlife present in lowland calcareous grassland can’t tolerate agricultural intensification. As nutrient levels in the soil increase – often as a result of rain washing in fertilisers from neighbouring farmland – the orchids and their calcareous root-mates get bullied by rank grasses and clovers. What follows is a cascade of suffering: the insect populations, which are often completely dependent on some of the rare chalk plants, die out, followed by the birds and mammals which feed on them. Conservation bodies are working hard to halt the decline by bringing back traditional land management practices, grazing regimes and set-aside sites.
After breezing through the meadow, we arrived at a barbed-wire fence decorated with milky clouds of sheep’s wool. On the other side was a steep south-facing slope home to a completely different community of plants. Instead of clovers there were vetches; instead of cock’s-foot there was meadow oat-grass. The perfect habitat for orchids.
This type of grassland has a distinctive feel to it, an amalgamation of the senses: the trill of a skylark, floating down from some unseen coordinate in the sky; the aroma of thyme and basil, reminiscent of an Italian kitchen; and a pallet of colours flecked across a hillside, shifting softly in the breeze. I grew up botanising on the chalk, so this was a habitat I knew intimately.
I scaled the fence, managing to avoid getting caught in the barbed wire, and dropped down on the other side. My parents settled down in the grass and took out their lunch, making me promise to call them if I found anything. For the next hour, I walked a wiggly pattern across the hillside. Common milkwort twinkled blue, pink, mauve and white, taking shelter in the shadow of the earthwork ring. There were crowds of kidney vetch, red egg-shaped heads of salad burnet and the delicate golden rings of horseshoe vetch. The dainty white flowers of fairy flax filled pockets in the thatch and swayed drunkenly in the breeze.
I ducked down to look at the sugar-puff flowers of quaking grass, dangling like bait on a fishing line. Each floret was like a tiny squashed pine cone and every breath of wind made the whole panicle shiver. It grew everywhere on my way down to the bottom of the hill. Along with the skylarks singing overhead I could hear the scratchy call of a whitethroat from the scrub down below. A glance to my left brought a pair of mating dingy skipper butterflies atop a large head of salad burnet and, just behind it, a single Burnt Orchid! I leapt over an anthill and crouched low on the ground before disappointment sheared through me. What I’d mistaken for a Burnt Orchid was actually a white-flowered chalk milkwort.
I skirted a patch of scrub where blackthorn and hawthorn fought for a roothold. A brown butterfly plummeted from the sky and whizzed along the path before coming to a rest on a bright-purple Green-winged Orchid. It flicked its wings open to reveal a dusting of ginger: a Duke of Burgundy. I’d longed to see one of these little gems for years. As an insect-loving child who loved making lists, naturally I’d quickly caught the butterfly bug. There was a hillside near my house that I’d affectionately named Bentleigh Bank, after the farmhouse in the valley, that came alive with butterflies every summer. Each week I walked the same route around the downland, counting butterflies and submitting my data to Butterfly Conservation. Over the years, I’d clocked up more than thirty different butterfly species on the hillside, including brown hairstreaks, chalkhill blues and dark green fritillaries, but despite searching every spring, I’d never found the rare Duke of Burgundy. The male in front of me was a kaleidoscope of orange and nutty brown. I watched it for several minutes before it rushed upwards to chase off a peacock, a butterfly more than three times its size, and I lost it among the scrub.
My parents joined me and we continued to patrol up and down the paths, but there were no more orchids. ‘You’d think they’d be easy to find, being rooted to the spot,’ my father reflected. ‘Surely you just turn up and there they are.’ He was joking, of course. Having trailed after me on countless occasions while I looked for plants, he knew better than most how long it could take to find orchids. Or perhaps he thought I was just bad at looking.
After reaching the top of Martin Down, the track met Bokerley Dike, a long ditch that runs the length of the reserve and provides sheltered hollows for butterflies and, I suspected, Burnt Orchids.
I found my first Burnt Orchid here in 2010, hiding under a hawthorn near the car park. My father had been in Sweden visiting my grandfather, known to me and my sisters as Farfar, in hospital. Although I had GCSEs to think about, I’d persuaded my mother to drive me and my sisters to Martin Down for an evening hunting the Burnt Orchid. Esther had been the first to find one, and I remember being amazed at how tiny they were. Plants often seem huge from the photos in books. As we were admiring this little ruby orchid, we received the sad news that Farfar had passed away. The Burnt Orchid would always remind me of him.
I reached a crossroads in the track and began scanning the grassland, looking for the lone hawthorn tree that stood near to where I had seen the orchids three years previously. It took a few minutes but I eventually spotted it, smaller than I remembered, and started wading through the knee-high grass: this in itself wasn’t promising. I searched for several minutes around the hawthorn but to no avail.
In 1886, A. D. Webster wrote that ‘on some of the green sloping Kentish hills this little orchid is very abundant, and during the summer quite enlivens the landscape with its quaintly conspicuous flowers’. Today, the Burnt Orchid requires a lot of patience and prolonged searching; it certainly wouldn’t be described as conspicuous. The last century has seen a dramatic decline in populations and range, thought to be primarily caused by the increase in ploughing after the Second World War and the decline in rabbit grazing following the onset of myxomatosis. Wiltshire, which has the Burnt Orchid as its county flower, is one of its few remaining strongholds.
Slightly disappointed, I decided to try another place, a half-mile walk across the downland. I crossed over the track and back into the grass, brushing through salad burnet bobs and the disc-like flowers of common rock-rose. A white-flowered group of milkworts appeared in my peripheral vision and I whipped round, heart racing, only to be disappointed again. I’d had enough of white milkworts.
I came across a middle-aged couple who were clearly botanising: they had hand lenses looped around their necks on threadbare ribbons and cameras slung over their shoulders. As I passed them, they were both crouched among the grass, the woman showing her husband some horseshoe vetch. It was a poignant moment; I wanted that.
After a few minutes, the grass shortened and I wandered into a large colony of Greater Butterfly Orchids, my unexpected twentieth. Greater Butterflies are ethereal plants: psychics, shrouded in mystery. Their tall, spindly stems arise from a pair of round, waxy leaves and hold an inflorescence of loosely arranged greenish-white flowers that glow eerily at twilight. Their Latin name, Platanthera chlorantha, is a tribute to this unique colour. Each flower has a long monkey’s-tail of a spur that holds nectar for butterflies and night-flying moths. Unfortunately, there were only three or four plants in flower, the rest of them still in tight bud – it would have been quite a spectacle had they all been flowering. I guessed there must have been about 300 plants.
John Gerard thought very highly of the Greater Butterfly and was the first to coin its name. In his Herball, Gerard describes this species as ‘that kinde which resembleth the white Butter-flie’. Despite deciding it had little or no use in medicine, he wrote that it had to be ‘regarded for the pleasant and beautiful flowers, where with nature hath seemed to play and disport her selfe’. He found it regularly ‘upon the declining of the hill at the North ende of Hampstead heath’ and ‘in the wood belonging to a worshipful gentleman of Kent named Master Sedley of Southfleete’.
In Flora Londinensis (1777), William Curtis writes that ‘the English name of Butterfly Orchis is scarcely warranted by the appearance of the flowers’. Seeing the butterfly in the flower certainly requires a significant stretch of the imagination. Instead, I thought, each flower reminded me more of an elephant. The white sepal on either side, presumably the wings of the butterfly, looked more like broad, flappy ears. The lip, supposed to be the butterfly’s body, was the trunk. Finally, instead of tusks, two long diverging pollinia. The Greater Elephant Orchid doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, nor the same connotations, so perhaps Butterfly is the right name for this handsomely delicate plant.
Known locally as the Night Violet in Wiltshire and as the White Angel in Somerset, the Greater Butterfly is a species best experienced after the sun has dipped below the horizon. Jocelyn Brooke, while considering which orchids he might stumble across in his local woodland, writes ‘possibly the noble, lily-like Butterfly, which one should encounter preferably in the evening, when the air of the woodland is heavy with its fragrance. Perhaps there is no greater reward for the orchid-hunter than to come upon this beautiful flower at the end of his day’s wandering’.
It once grew in the field behind our house. The Top Field, as we called it, was one of my favourite childhood haunts. I carried out endless butterfly transects and plant surveys and it was where my father and I went sweep-netting in the summer. At that stage, I’d only been botanising for a couple of years and was still finding my feet, getting to grips with the differences between the trickier species of common plants. I knew this was a butterfly orchid from the hours I’d spent reading my flower guides, but which one I wasn’t sure. It was only returning to the orchid armed with camera and wildflower guide that I identified it as Greater rather than Lesser. The pollinia were diverging, forming an inverted ‘V’, not parallel as they are in the Lesser Butterfly. This, among other subtle differences, appeared to be the key point of identification. Unfortunately, my delight at finding an orchid in the Top Field was short-lived. The following year, the field was ploughed up and converted into arable land and all that had grown there, Greater Butterfly Orchid included, was gone for ever.
I continued marching across the downs, clambering through an old earthwork that had left tell-tale lumps and mounds in the grass. As they have not been disturbed for hundreds of years, these are often the best places to find interesting plants. My search quickly proved fruitful as I came across the increasingly rare field fleawort, a plant that is related to the prolific ragworts so familiar to many of us as a weed of waste ground and gardens. Its flower is like a child’s drawing of the sun, with yellow rays sparking from its golden centre. I found a Common Spotted Orchid just bursting into flower and large swathes of horseshoe vetch, adding yet another shade of yellow to the downland’s palette.
I had subconsciously taken the white milkwort as a bad omen, likening it to the no-show of Burnt Orchids at Clearbury the week before. Unfortunately, it proved to be the case once again. I searched fruitlessly, failing to find the plants I knew were in flower. It was frustrating: somewhere, not far from where I stood, was my twenty-first orchid. I had experienced problems finding Dense-flowered Orchids in Ireland and now Burnt Orchids were troubling me too. I hadn’t had much luck with these two Neotineas.
It was late so I headed back to the car. The sun was low on the horizon. Yellowhammers sang about a little-bit-of-bread-but-no-cheese from the hedgerow and, if I stood still and listened carefully, I could hear the soft purring of a turtle dove from the woods at the top of the hill. Despite failing to find Burnt Orchids for the second time in a week, I was in good spirits. I’ve grown up plant hunting on the chalk of Wiltshire and Hampshire and the experience of walking through chalk grassland on a warm summer’s evening is something that I will always treasure. Seeing the Greater Butterfly Orchid had been an unexpected bonus. Jocelyn Brooke had clearly been in a similar situation himself: ‘The Butterfly is not uncommon, and often provides a well-deserved compensation for the rarity which one has sought for, in vain, through the hot downland afternoon.’
The following afternoon, I drove through Salisbury once again, heading west towards Martin Down as I’d done the previous day. It was my last chance to see a Burnt Orchid before heading off to Yorkshire, so I’d decided to try a nature reserve near Coombe Bissett.
I knew before I started that this had to be a quick visit as it was my mother’s fiftieth birthday. Several weeks before, she had issued strict instructions to keep her birthday free and ensure I could be around to help with the celebrations. I agreed to this without hesitating. No orchid hunting on the ninth. That was that.
By lucky coincidence, I wasn’t up a mountain somewhere on the other side of the country when the time came. However, I’d also expected to have found the Burnt Orchid by now. So that afternoon, once all the guests had arrived at our house and I’d plied my mother with several glasses of champagne, I quietly slipped away. I would be back before she noticed anyway.
I turned off by the small church in Coombe Bissett and scaled the hill, almost missing the car park as I admired the lane-side display of doily-flowered Queen-Anne’s-lace. I love this time of year when rural country lanes are lined with this white umbellifer.
Still dressed in my suit and tie, I grabbed my satchel from the back seat and locked the car. I headed off down the hill, surrounded by the dull green of arable fields. Coombe Bissett Down is a hidden valley that has escaped modern-day agriculture. Its slopes are too steep for machinery which, mercifully, has meant that it’s been grazed annually by sheep during the winter, allowing the grassland to thrive.
Two years previously, I’d visited with Dominic Price to survey the hillside for Burnt Orchids as part of a BSBI threatened plants project. Dom is the director of the Species Recovery Trust, a small charity aiming to save fifty species from the brink of extinction by 2050. With a passion for Britain’s plants and a shared sense of humour, we immediately became friends. Earlier in the day, I’d texted him to see if he was able to join me but, unfortunately, he couldn’t make it.
The path, surrounded on both sides by a buttery wash of bulbous buttercups and common rock-roses, curved its way down to the valley bottom. I dilly-dallied along the path, marvelling at the wildflowers tripping over one another in their abundance. First came the small red-purple flowers of hound’s-tongue, then horseshoe vetch in droves, irresistibly delicate quaking grass and bobbed heads of salad burnet. Burnt Orchids wouldn’t want to grow anywhere else.
I paused, looking down at my ridiculous orchid-hunting outfit. Please don’t let me be discovered here, I thought. With the ticking clock in mind, I hesitated no longer and plunged into the long grass. I made my way along the hillside, about a third of the way up, following one of the terracettes around the contour of the slope. These slumped almost-paths make steep pastures look rippled like a beach at low tide. It was the perfect place for Burnt Orchids.
Removing my jacket, I set about searching, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my shoulders. There were sheep in the adjacent field, outside the reserve. A lamb stood bawling in the middle of the field, and its mother responded from a corner by the woods.
I scanned the shorter patches of grass and spotted a white flower spike, the top few flowers scorched deep red. Here, at last, was a Burnt Orchid.
Burnt Orchids, or Burnt Tip Orchids as they are sometimes known, are for want of a much better word, cute. They are the teddy bear of the orchid world. Usually no more than ten centimetres tall, they are a wonderful sight among the grasses as the beautifully rich claret of the buds fades into white down the inflorescence. Some plants are tipped with a pale Burgundy; others with the deep colour of a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Pinot Noir.
Turning to my right, I let out a low whistle and walked over to an unusually large spike with a tall inflorescence holding at least forty flowers. Each lip resembled a dwarfed figure, as white as the chalk they rose from, dotted with burgeoning gunshot wounds.
I realised how easy it would be to miss, lost in the tangle of grass. It almost looked like red clover if you glanced over it quickly enough, or more whimsically, like little cherries. It’s been described as a miniature edition of the Lady Orchid; however, while similarities exist, I felt the comparison hardly did justice to this exquisite plant.
The origin of the Burnt Orchid’s Latin name, Neotinea ustulata, is debated. Some argue that it is named after a Sicilian botanist called Vicenzo Tineo, while others believe it refers to the supposed similarity to the African genus Tinnea, named by Dutch explorer Henrietta Tinne. Its species name ustulata, ‘scorched-looking’ or ‘to burn’, clearly refers to the dark colour of the unopened buds.
I wondered guiltily about the party back at home and quickly checked my phone. Just one text, from my father:
Where are you?
I grabbed my camera and stuffed it back in my bag. As I pulled my jacket on, I made my way down to the bottom of the slope, where I realised I was being watched by a woman and her dogs from the path. Stopping the dogs, she asked what I was doing and whether I was studying plants. Her whole face lit up when she heard I was looking for orchids.
‘It’s so nice to meet someone else who’s looking for what you’re looking for,’ she said.
It turned out she lived in the village and enjoyed bringing the dogs here so that she could watch the orchids as they came out every year. I felt my phone buzz.
Leif, seriously, where are you? D.
She was giving me directions to a grassy bank within Salisbury Hospital that had sprouted sixty Bee Orchids the previous year. I was hurriedly noting down her instructions.
You better not be orchid hunting.
These Bee Orchids sounded huge! Some had had eight or nine flowers. I had to get the details down. After another couple of minutes, once I had made her confusing descriptions legible, I made my excuses and began jogging back to the car. Inexplicably, she hadn’t asked me about my suit.
I arrived home and parked my car across the road. I ran up the drive and round the side of the house, hoping to avoid my father until I could make it obvious I’d been there the entire time. Straightening my jacket, I glided back into the party. I thought I’d seamlessly integrated myself until I bumped into my parents, who took one look at me and then almost in unison asked, how could I? I glanced down at my dishevelled tie, crumpled trousers and mud-scuffed shoes. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to change. It didn’t matter though; I’d seen the Burnt Orchid.