‘There is, about all orchids, something inherently odd – something rather perverse and ambiguous, something even a trifle sinister.’
Jocelyn Brooke, The Wild Orchids of Britain (1950)
Northumberland
June 2013
John Ray was an English naturalist of the seventeenth century whose cataloguing of plants helped us take an important step towards modern taxonomy. He was one of the first botanists to comprehensively classify the British flora, travelling up and down the country on horseback, discovering swathes of wildflowers never recorded before.
Educated at Cambridge University, Ray developed a longing to understand the natural world and swiftly became fascinated by the wild plants growing in the countryside. In 1656, he began working on what would become his Cambridge Catalogue of plants, relying largely on what he had taught himself as there was a distinct lack of authority from which to draw. His work was the first attempt at classifying plants based entirely on science.
Once his Catalogue had been published, Ray hatched plans to put together a complete flora of Britain and would spend summers travelling across the country studying plants and their habitats. In 1659, he was accompanied by a friend on a tour of northern England, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Covering an epic distance in one summer, they recorded endless lists of new species. I’m envious of Ray in so many ways, but perhaps most because he had a botanical friend. In my decade of botanising, I had so far failed to find a friend who liked plants as much as I do.
An account of Ray’s travels was published by the Royal Society. As well as detailing his findings, he included a travellogue for those who weren’t particularly interested in nature. Ray was already trying to get more people interested in plants. Botanists have accumulated numerous stereotypes over the centuries: as crazy loners best left to themselves; as groups of fuzzy old scientists hiding away in herbaria filled with dried plants and microscopes; and members of societies whose average age is sixty-plus and who spend every day talking about miniscule plant structures in Latin. This is an image that must change. I respected Ray’s attempts to make botany more accessible for those who had never shown any interest in plants.
Above all, Ray never took for granted the fact that he had been born into a time when the world was moving from being dependent on the teaching of Aristotle to making observations and testing theories with experimentation. From a botanical point of view, it must have been an extremely exciting time to be alive. In the twenty-first century, Britain has one of the most extensively recorded floras in the world so the chances of discovering new species are close to zero. Exploring the countryside in the 1600s, riding through woods bursting with plants, many of which have since been doomed to extinction, is every botanist’s dream.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to rely on horses to explore Britain. A journey that would have required a week for Ray to complete took me just a few hours by car.
After I’d finished with the Lady’s Slipper, I’d driven to our small house in Haworth, a village made famous by the Brontë family. As my parents are both vicars, our Wiltshire home belongs to the Church, so we’re allowed to live there as long as my father stays in his job. The house that my parents own is in Haworth, and has been the destination of our family holidays for as long as I can remember.
Slotted into the corner between two terraces, our tiny home is full of character: each room is different, and none of them are remotely matching. The kitchen has pine-panelled walls, sloping shelves and a random assortment of utensils hung on hooks. The floorboards are painted dark green, covered in the corner by a threadbare rug, and along one wall there’s an old church pew. A rickety table holds generations of candles and vases of moorland grasses that have paled with age. Next door, there’s a real hotchpotch of furniture in the mustard-yellow living room: a creaky wicker chair, a round wooden table once ridden with woodboring beetles and a lumpy sofa whose springs have all broken on one side. Above the breezy fireplace there’s a collection of pine cones, washed-out photographs of my parents when they were younger and pencil pots filled with dried heather on the mantelpiece. Up the steep staircase is a strange, triangular room that I used to share with my sisters. My parents were across the hall in a room with gritty wallpaper and heavy, velvet curtains.
When I was a child, trips from Haworth cemented my obsession with nature. A walk along Bridgehouse Beck brought an up-close, personal encounter with a sleepy white-letter hairstreak, a butterfly that spends most of its life at the top of elm trees. One summer, my father and I spent a week birdwatching in boxy lakeside hides and saw avocets sweeping their curved bills through the water as marsh harriers circled overhead. On a trip to Fountain’s Abbey the following spring, I saw my first Common Twayblades. Later, I would dedicate each holiday to botany, teaching myself how to identify the plants I wasn’t able to find in the south. Spending so much time there played an important role in my formative years and the development of my interest in botany. This year the house in Haworth proved invaluable as a base throughout the summer as I yo-yoed my way up and down the country.
For the next two orchids on my list I had to travel further north, to Newcastle. They were the Coralroot Orchid and the Lesser Twayblade. These two species are small, inconspicuous and very good at hiding. I would be lucky to see them both in a day. Checking internet forums, it seemed like I was just in time. Both species had reached their peak and wouldn’t be flowering for much longer. I had to see them in the next couple of days.
The evening before my trip to Newcastle, I was faced with an unexpected problem: my phone had switched itself off and was stubbornly refusing to start up again. I used the landline to call home and told my father, explaining my plan to drive to Northumberland and stay overnight at a campsite before returning to Haworth the following morning. It would give me two days to find both orchids. We agreed that it would be worth buying a cheap phone to see me through: a simple solution with no further worry.
If the broken phone hadn’t been a bad omen, then the fact that Sainsbury’s had sold out of cheap replacements should have been. I stood there in the aisle, weighing up my options. Spending seventy pounds on a phone for two days seemed excessive so I walked away, reassuring myself that I’d be back home before I knew it.
The drive up to Newcastle passed quickly and Fleur, my satnav, effortlessly navigated me through the city to Gosforth, where I pulled off the main road into a small layby outside Gosforth Park Nature Reserve. This small area of woodland in Newcastle is privately owned by the Natural History Society of Northumberland and is only open to members. I had managed to obtain a permit to visit the site for the day and it was here that I was hoping to see the Coralroot Orchid.
Corallorhiza trifida, to give it its Latin name, is so called because of the branched, coral-like appearance of the plant’s ‘roots’ (technically these structures are horizontal underground stems rather than true roots). This bizarre orchid has no leaves, instead relying on its photosynthetic stem and fungal partner for carbohydrates. For much of its life it’s almost completely dependent upon this relationship. Like the Bird’s-nest Orchid, it’s extremely fussy, and is only ever associated with fungi from the Thelephora-Tomentella group. In turn, these fungi always form relationships with pines, birches, alders and willows. As a result, Coralroot Orchids are associated with two distinct habitats: damp, willow-carpeted dune slacks, and wet woodland filled with alder, birch and Scot’s pine. The fungi obtain carbohydrates from the trees, only for it to be poached by the orchids. It’s a one-way relationship: the parasitic Coralroot cheats the fungus, giving nothing in return.
I was cautious as I entered the reserve, very aware that without my phone I didn’t have a copy of my permit. To anyone who didn’t believe my story, I’d be trespassing. Or at least it would be what I like to call Good Natured Botanical Trespassing – when you see a rare plant on the other side of a barbed-wire fence and just have to get a look at it. In the past, I’d been chased away from rich wildflower meadows by land-owners who hadn’t understood my good-natured intentions. Hopefully I wouldn’t run into a scary warden today.
A short way along the path into the nature reserve, situated just inside the treeline, was a squat wooden cabin. On the porch, two men dressed in khaki combat trousers and walking boots sat sprawled in camping chairs. Their faces were obscured by olive-green caps and one had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling limply from his mouth. Clouds of smoke hung in the air. Between them, on a tinny metal table, lay a pair of binoculars and a crumpled map.
They noticed me immediately and watched silently as I approached. It was intimidating. I greeted them and briefly outlined my predicament: no phone, no printer, no permit. I was trying hard not to think about how I would find the Coralroot Orchid if they turned me away. They still hadn’t said anything. Eventually, the man with the cigarette stood up.
‘We believe you, mate, but we’re going to have to take you to the orchids. There’s no way you’d find them otherwise,’ he said in a thick Geordie accent. A stroke of luck. He introduced himself as Paul, the reserve warden. Grinding his cigarette out on the table and readjusting his hat, he said goodbye to his friend and we began walking into the wood in uncomfortable silence.
My first impression was that it was gloomy. As we walked, the path became damp, then wet and eventually dipped into swampy pools. We stepped onto a boardwalk that took us through the waterlogged wood of alder and willow. It occurred to me that this was probably what the whole area once looked like: miles and miles of endless forest and swamps. Now this was all that was left and Newcastle was standing on the burial site of acres of wooded fens.
After walking for ten minutes, Paul turned off the path and made his way down to a birch tree in the reed bed where there were a few wooden boards laid out over the mud. I’d seen the Coralroot Orchids before he pointed them out, their bright-green stems glowing in the low woodland light. Miraculously, they were still in flower. After another minute of conversation, I thanked him for helping me and he left me alone in the middle of this dense, wet forest.
There were about thirty orchids altogether, spread out on cushions of moss among the reeds. The few dingy flowers were well spaced and pointing in different directions like a signpost. Each bloom had greenish-yellow sepals, held forwards as if they were offering each other an embrace, and a white lip that kinked downwards, spattered with crimson spots. While equipped for insect pollination, the flowers usually go about their business by themselves. The pollen is loosely attached and easily falls off, landing on the stigma and resulting in self-pollination. When fertilised, the flower is no longer needed and deteriorates. Because this happens routinely, the flowers are only at their best for a couple of days, making it a pesky species to catch in flower.
The first British record for the Coralroot Orchid was made by the Reverend John Lightfoot in 1777. He reported in Flora Scotica that ‘Ophrys Corallorhiza’ grew ‘in a moist hanging wood near the head of Little Loch Broom on the western coast of Ross-shire’. At this time, ‘Ophrys’ was a general term used for orchids, not just the furry insect mimics that bear the name today. Since then it has been recorded across northern Britain, occurring as far south as Yorkshire, but mainly growing in eastern Scotland, where it has become the county flower of Fife.
Populations of Coralroot Orchid have been under-recorded and many have been overlooked completely. Their small, leafless stems blend into the background of moss and leaf litter. This, coupled with their erratic flowering behaviour, has resulted in many colonies growing undiscovered for years. Efforts to document its range have turned up a lot of new sites, predominantly across Scotland, where several large populations have been found. While it doesn’t seem to be particularly vulnerable in its Scottish localities, drainage of its habitat and destruction of woodland could lead to a serious decline in numbers.
I’d never encountered a plant that looked as alien as these lime-green orchids. They popped up through the browned oak and birch leaves scattered across the ground, like six-eyed periscopes looking in all directions. Even now they were extracting nutrients leached from the birch tree they grew under like some weird foreign life form. Somewhere beneath where I stood was a large, intricate network of fungal hyphae that the orchid had somehow coerced into doing its dirty work.
Satisfied, I made my way back through the trees, along the boardwalk and back to the main road. Hopping back in the car, I gave Fleur instructions to direct me to a remote area of moorland south of Hexham where I was going to search for Lesser Twayblades. It was a forty-five-minute drive, meaning that if I found them quickly I might be able to return to Haworth before nightfall.
It was at four o’clock that afternoon, heading south on the motorway through Newcastle, that things started to go wrong. Noticing a small loss of power to the engine, I glanced down at the speedometer. The needle was slowly but steadily dropping towards zero. With a sinking heart, I turned off the radio and heard the last sound I wanted to hear: a sort of discordant grating. Without any warning, the car began juddering violently, scattering the pens and sweets piled up on the dashboard. I pulled into the left-hand lane and then into a small parking layby and ground to a halt.
I turned off the engine and sat still for some time, trying to think about what to do. The car had broken down. I was hours away from home. My phone wasn’t working.
I felt incredibly foolish. My car had always been a disaster, so why had I attempted this journey without a working phone? I decided to let the engine cool down, hoping that it had just overheated. I read my book and tried to forget everything that had happened. To my right, the ceaseless roar of traffic flashed past. After half an hour, I tried the engine again, but was met by the same argumentative tone that I had heard before, as if it were saying: ‘I’m old and tired, please just leave me alone’. I was completely on my own.
Time slipped by with the blur of motorway traffic. I suddenly came to, realising I’d fallen asleep. Deciding that there was no point just sitting here, and wishing I was at home, I slid over to the passenger seat and opened the door, letting in a blast of hot exhaust fumes. I looked up and down the road, searching for an emergency phone. Nothing. I packed a rucksack with food and water, my road atlas and a jumper, and set off back along the motorway.
The walk was awful. I was bombarded with hot dust and loud noise. Battered beer cans and crusted sweet wrappers collected at the side of the road and in the grass, thrown carelessly from car windows. Empty crisp packets scuttled and scudded with every rush of hot air.
After five minutes, I made it to a slip road and walked up to the roundabout at the top, noticing a walkway that ran overhead. I couldn’t see either end. This was utterly ridiculous. Ducking under the bridge, I crossed no-man’s-land and worked my way along the downward slope of the walkway until I could reach the railings. Shaking my head with disbelief at what I was having to do, I pulled myself up, climbing the metal railings and levering myself over the top and onto the walkway. Saluting the CCTV camera that stood watch above me, I turned and started walking into Newcastle.
One hour later, I was back in the car. After walking for twenty minutes, I’d managed to locate a pay phone. But I only had the coins for one phone call: the AA or home? In hindsight, the logical option would have been to call the AA, but I was too stressed and desperately wanted to talk to my family. There are no words to describe how relieved I was to hear my father answer the phone, his voice faint and crackly on the other end of the line. I knew it would all be okay. We agreed that while the engine could still start the best thing to do would be to try to get to the campsite I was booked into for the night. I would be able to sleep there and use someone’s phone.
Now, back in the car, I felt more confident. The engine, while still not perfect, was sounding a lot better than it had before and the campsite was only half an hour’s drive away. I could make it. Throwing the car into gear, I merged back onto the motorway. The needle of the speedometer was cruising towards seventy and for a moment I relaxed. The malfunction seemed to be over.
One mile later, I came off the motorway and stopped at the traffic lights at the top of the slip road. Able to focus again, I thought about how I was going to get from the campsite to see the Lesser Twayblades. It was too far to walk, but perhaps there would be a bus I could catch to the nearest village. Orchid hunting by public transport would be considerably harder.
Distracted, it was only as the lights turned green that I realised the Ford in front of me had its bonnet in the air. At least I hadn’t broken down there. Checking my mirrors, I tried moving round it but stalled. I tried again but the same thing happened. Then the car wouldn’t start at all.
I was suddenly aware of how dangerously problematic this was. I had broken down, this time seemingly for good, in the middle of a four-lane slip road at rush hour. Trying not to let panic take over, I flicked the hazard lights on and climbed out, carefully edging my way over to the car in front, as motorway traffic pulled up at the lights on either side. A frightened man in his forties sat behind the wheel, his view of the roundabout blocked by the grey wall of metal rising in front of him. He jumped when I knocked on the window.
‘Hi, sorry, can I borrow your phone? I’ve just broken down too,’ I said by way of explanation. He gave me a forlorn look before reluctantly handing over his phone. I didn’t want to think about what I’d have done had he not been here.
I rang the AA, becoming increasingly frustrated with the automated voice on the other end. ‘Before talking to a member of our team, we would like you to listen to the following safety rules.’ I felt like shouting.
Suddenly, there was a roar behind me and I turned my head to see a large orange Range Rover pull up with the words ‘TRAFFIC OFFICER’ emblazoned across the bonnet. Pure relief flooded through me: here was someone who could sort me out. A uniformed man jumped out and strode over, looking cross. Hanging up on the AA, who were still asking whether I had used the correct fuel, I handed the phone back to the scared-looking man in the Ford. A pick-up truck had arrived to save him. The traffic officer took control of the situation. Without talking, he attached the Range Rover to the front of my car before ordering me back inside and towing me to relative safety on the verge of the roundabout.
Less than forty-eight hours after breaking down in Newcastle, I was back. The events of the previous two days had been a sleep-deprived blur. The AA had towed me back to Winterslow in stages, travelling through the night. I had the car dropped off at the garage and walked across the fields back to my bed. I was in a bad mood: I had missed the Lesser Twayblade and without my car there was no way I would be able to travel anywhere remote to find it.
Two hours later, I was woken up for Sunday lunch by my father, who outlined his plan: he wanted to drive me up to Haworth that afternoon, and then on to Newcastle the next day. Lesser Twayblades were back on.
The Lesser Twayblade is predominantly a plant of Scotland and northern England but it does also occur in Wales and in select locations in the Midlands and, quite randomly, on Exmoor. A much smaller plant than its relative the Common Twayblade, I’d decided to maximise my chances of finding this inconspicuous orchid by visiting a site in the north where it supposedly flowered in large numbers. This remote area of moorland didn’t look particularly special.
I pulled on my wellies, slung my satchel over my shoulder and began squelching down the hill, my father following close behind. I was very pleased to be able to share one of my trips with him and determined to make the long drive worth it. It had been a while since we had last been on a father-and-son trip. He was always a welcome addition, providing me with information about the birds and insects I might have otherwise ignored.
I described a Lesser Twayblade to him as best I could: petite, a basal pair of oval leaves, a reddish stem and tiny dark-red flowers. It was always harder searching for something you had never seen before. Lesser Twayblades are one of our most diminutive orchids. Not only are they small and difficult to spot but they tend to grow under the heather rather than out in the open, preferring the damp mossy areas to the dry peat.
The first British record for this miniature orchid was made by Christopher Merrett in 1666 from ‘neer the Beacon on Pendle Hill in Lancashire’. He calls it Bifolium minimum, which efficiently describes its size and pair of leaves. The leaves actually grow halfway up the stem, but this is often difficult to observe as the bottom half of the stem is usually buried in the moss.
In the end, it took only a few minutes to find the orchids. I had crouched down to admire a scrambling web of wild cranberry when I spotted the first. The tiny flowers are forked like a snake’s tongue, and a rich ruby red that contrasts beautifully with the bright green of the leaves. An alternative, and far nicer name is the Heart-leaved Twayblade, which is reflected in the species’ Latin name, Neottia cordata; cordata meaning ‘heart-shaped’. Together with the Common Twayblade, it used to be part of the genus Listera, which honours Martin Lister (1639–1712), the English doctor and naturalist, who was a friend of John Ray. However, genetic analysis suggested that it should be united with the Bird’s-nest Orchid in the genus Neottia, meaning ‘nest of fledglings’, which is where it lies today.
Once we had got our eye in, there was no stopping us. The moor was overflowing with Lesser Twayblades. Amid exclamations of ‘and another one!’, we picked our way along a small stream that ran down the hill. Each cushion of Sphagnum moss hosted scores of twayblades. At one stage, I pulled back a sprig of heather to reveal eight, nine, ten plants. And another, and another. They were everywhere, spilling out from under the heather and bilberry bushes and gathering in the moss by the stream.
Lesser Twayblades are the court jesters of the orchid world. They seemed to congregate in groups and I imagined them telling stories, jokes and tales of mischief.
The smell of wet peat filled the air as I knelt down with my camera, water instantly soaking through to my knees and trickling down into my wellies. Every time I crouched in front of what I thought was the perfect specimen, it would move slightly, completely ruining the composition. It was as if they were purposefully trying to be difficult. I could imagine them teasing me, scampering back under the heather each time I got close enough to take a photo.
My father was relieved to have found them and we spent a happy couple of hours, working in tandem and pointing out the best spots to one another. I realised how much I missed the long summer days when he and I would abandon whatever we were doing to go and look for wildlife. There is a childlike freedom about giving yourself over to the excitement of nature, and being able to share that with someone else is doubly rewarding. Not for the first time, I thought about how fun it would be to share my travels with a friend my own age. Setting out to see all the orchids in Britain had proved to be a relatively lonely task. I was desperate for a friend who shared my love of plants.
The drumming of a snipe broke the silence. We spotted it whirring low over the bilberry: its didgeridoo-like call was utterly bizarre. The moor was beginning to bruise as concentrated patches of heather burst into flower. It wouldn’t be long before the entire hillside was a sea of bright purple.
It was a relief to have the whole breakdown fiasco behind me. Two days previously, sitting in my Vauxhall on the roundabout in Newcastle, I hadn’t expected to be on the moors searching for Lesser Twayblades so soon. During a particularly low moment, I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be able to make it back up north in time to see them. My father really had saved my whole summer. I couldn’t have done it without him.
At the time, I’d been too preoccupied with the Lesser Twayblade to think about the car, but now that I’d ticked off my twenty-fourth species, my thoughts turned to how I was going to see the next ones. How was I going to travel around? My parents certainly didn’t have the time to ferry me everywhere. As the clouds gathered above, we bade goodbye to the jesters on the moor and made our way back to the car, beginning the long journey south.