‘As Orchids are universally acknowledged to rank amongst the most singular and most modified forms in the vegetable kingdom, I have thought that the facts to be given might lead some observers to look more curiously into the habits of our several native species. An examination of their many beautiful contrivances will exalt the whole vegetable kingdom in most persons’ estimation.’
Charles Darwin, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are fertilised by Insects (1862)
Hampshire
June 2013
To say Francis Rose knew his plants is something of an understatement. In fact, he was one of the best field botanists of the twentieth century and he was constantly looking for excuses to go botanising. Writing in the Guardian in 2006, David Bellamy remembers that whether it was ‘flowering plants, ferns, mosses, liverworts and lichens – not a single species was missed by the mastermind. I can well remember, while high on Ben Lawers in Perthshire, Francis looking at his watch and exclaiming that, as dinner was already being served at the youth hostel, we could carry on for another couple of hours. We did, and wrote up our field notes before falling into bed, ready for an early start the next day. This was the infectious enthusiasm of the man’.
In 1981, he published his Wild Flower Key, an identification guide that took British botany to new levels, which is still in print today and used by botanists across the country.
Born in south London, Rose developed his interest at an early age, during long walks looking for plants with his grandfather. At school, he went about teaching himself biology as it wasn’t offered on the curriculum. After getting a botany degree from the University of London, he eventually became a lecturer on the subject. He completed his PhD on lowland bogs in Britain, and it was while doing this work that he began to notice differences among populations of Fragrant Orchid. Perhaps there were more than two different types.
That first week after my trip to Northumberland was one of the slowest of the summer. My car was finished: it had broken down for the last time and was being sold for scrap metal. I’d grown attached to my clunky Vauxhall, and was sad to see it go. Emptying it of all my things was a low point.
I didn’t have long to mourn, though, as a replacement was needed quickly. Reports of Lesser Butterfly and Heath Fragrant Orchids were coming in thick and fast. Fortunately, I was once again in the wonderfully capable hands of the Horner family who run the local garage. They have bailed me out on more occasions than I can remember and without them I would never have been able to spend the summer hunting orchids. They pointed me in the right direction and, after reluctantly emptying my bank account of all the money I’d saved from my job at Waitrose over the winter, I drove home in a silver Ford Focus.
In the following few days, I made a series of short day trips from home, enjoying the feel of the Focus on the road and slowly introducing it to some of my favourite botanical haunts. I coasted along empty country lanes, windows down, botany books flapping in the breeze, stopping only to check out road verges resplendent with wildflowers.
I hadn’t intended to make another trip to see Burnt Orchids; I’d presumed they’d finished flowering by now. But the day I bought my Focus, I received a tip-off from a former primary school teacher of mine that the ustulata were still staging a wonderful display up at Martin Down. The accompanying photos sold it to me. This was the perfect excuse to try out my new car and make a second visit, with a better idea of where the plants were.
When I arrived, Martin Down was bathed in beautiful early-evening sunlight. Skylarks and whitethroats sung from their vantage points in the sky and the bush, enhanced rather than drowned out by the monotonous chirping of grasshoppers and crickets from the sward. I took my time, wandering slowly along the springy paths and stopping every now and then to take photographs of the hundreds of Common Spotted Orchids that grew in small pockets all over the downs. Some plants were small, weedy, with spikes bearing three or four mauve flowers, while others were much larger, their robust stems supporting upwards of fifty. Each flower was crowded with the hypnotic pink and purple swirls of raspberry ripple ice cream.
In my early days as a botanist, I collected plants. My mother, keen to encourage my interest, allowed me to pick flowers so long as they were common. I would take a few new species home after every walk, pressing them carefully between sheets of old newspaper and kitchen towel in her small flower press. After waiting several days, I would remove each flower and secure it in a notebook using sticky-back plastic, writing out key information underneath: name, date, location and habitat.
One June, I had been on a year-seven geography field trip with school. Like many children, I found pebble size and erosion rates exceedingly dull, so naturally spent the entire trip secretly botanising instead. When I found new species, I had to make sure none of my friends were looking before I picked them. With nowhere to keep the plants I collected, I had to eat my sandwiches two hours early in order to make room for fresh specimens of crosswort and field scabious. At the end of each day, I would have several new species stored in my sandwich box, but my prize find was a Common Spotted Orchid. Back at home, I excitedly took it out to show my mother. She was mortified. I had picked an orchid. I had clearly crossed some sort of line and was made to shamefully explain where it had come from. That was the one and only time I’ve ever picked an orchid. I still remember its purple swirls, now fastened lovingly into one of my notebooks.
The Common Spotted Orchids on Martin Down were fantastically variable. There were masses of them, springing up in groups of as many as nine or ten. They lined the path running alongside an old military earthwork that towered above the surrounding grassland, climbing up and over – utterly unfazed. Nearby, anthills were spilling wild thyme and fairy flax. Yellow rattle and horseshoe vetch glowed a warm yellow in the sunshine. As I walked, the summer’s first brood of Adonis blues danced through the meadow.
Before long, I’d wandered into a small colony of Chalk Fragrant Orchids, interspersed among the Common Spotteds. Their flowers are babyish: soft, muted pinks and exaggerated curves. Some inflorescences were cylindrical barrels, others more like cathedral spires in the way they towered over the surrounding vegetation. I’d never seen Fragrant Orchids so large and dominant. Regardless of height, each delicate flower spike stood gracefully in the short turf, waiting patiently for the sun to dip below the horizon.
Fragrant Orchids have a very long, nectar-holding spur at the back of the flower and can therefore only be pollinated by insects with an equally long proboscis. Night-flying moths are ideally adapted for this and so it is at night, rather than by day, that most pollination takes place. As the evening draws to a close, when most other plants and their pollinators are turning in for the night, the Chalk Fragrants turn on the style. Within minutes of the sun dropping below the horizon, the orchids release an overpowering fragrance into the warm evening air that moths find irresistible. You haven’t met the Chalk Fragrant until you’ve experienced it at twilight. Its afternoon aroma attracts butterflies, day-flying moths and the occasional botanist, but the orchid is merely biding its time and gearing up for the evening show.
Already slightly light-headed with the sweet, sickly scent of these orchids, I carried on, working my way down Bokerley Dyke. Then came chalk downland at its very best. I weaved through the grassland, sidestepping the little yellow flowers of field fleawort, the rare relative of the ragwort that grows in profusion later in the summer. In doing so, I almost trampled some dropwort, whose pure-white flowers were still tucked away inside swollen red buds.
About ten metres away stood a Burnt Orchid, tiny and well past its best but a Martin Down Burnt Orchid nonetheless. It turned out to be merely a sentry, a lookout, for on the slope below were a further fifteen spikes. Their wine-coloured sepals faded to pale strawberry at their base.
I was suddenly and unexpectedly overcome by the beauty of these richly coloured plants and the never-ending floral downland surrounding them; by the way the quaking grass danced in that ethereal evening light; and by how vulnerable each component of this unique community appeared.
There is something remarkably humbling about sitting in chalk grassland at sunset. I felt honoured to witness the movements of the down as everything silently and simultaneously slowed in the dwindling light. Butterflies finished their nectar meals and dropped one by one into the long grass; the thick, gloopy warble of a nightingale faded into the gloam; and the bumblebees, which had been busily buzzing, nestled into the chalk milkwort right in front of me.
Deciding to go and check on the progress of the Greater Butterfly Orchids that I’d found a fortnight earlier, I walked up the hill, parting a sea of upright brome as I reached the top. The colony was in fine flower, grand spikes of exquisite ghostly-white flowers open from top to bottom, glowing in the dusk. There were hundreds of them in the grass in front of me. Just like the Fragrants, Butterfly Orchids are predominantly pollinated by night-flying moths of the Noctuid family. As if on cue, the dark outline of a moth buzzed in, hovering before one of the flowers before swooping away and crash-landing in a grassy tussock, its wings vibrating so rapidly that they were reduced to a blur.
By now the sun had dropped and a greyish light had set over the downs. The scent on the air was pungent, overpowering almost. I sat in the middle of the colony, surrounded by glow-in-the-dark Butterfly Orchids, becoming giddier by the minute and totally, utterly happy.
Having spent the weekend with my family, Monday morning dawned, spelling the beginning of a busy week. I set out with my friend Ben to drive to the New Forest and hunt down some of the commoner orchids of Heath and Bog. The air had a midsummer warmth to it, the sky was a bright white blanket and Ben was on top form, keeping me entertained with tales of his first year at university.
As I had grown up in Wiltshire, summer trips to the New Forest were a monthly event. Over the years, I had fallen in love with the forest, with its wide-open plains dotted with gorse and small birch copses. I have fond memories of the wonderfully named Upper Crockford Bottom near Beaulieu where, early in my courtship of nature, I would go dragonflying with Dad, chasing hawkers and demoiselles up and down the tiny stream. During later visits, my attention was robbed by the indigenous flora and I would comb the stream for pillwort and Hampshire-purslane.
By the time I hit GCSEs, I’d already sought out a whole host of rarities: bastard balm at Wilverley, pennyroyal and small fleabane near Cadnam, and glorious manta-ray-blue marsh gentians south of Lyndhurst. During my A levels, I moved on to the trees and spent hours over the winter teaching myself how to identify them without their leaves. It’s become a special place for me and provides a nice alternative to my beloved chalk downs.
I picked Ben up at ten and drove down to Wilverley. Most of my friends had left Salisbury, or ‘The Shire’ as it’s colloquially known to departing students, to go to university. I’d seen very little of them during the past six months and was feeling left behind. They had moved on, made new friends and discovered a whole new sense of independence in cities across the country. I had a sense of being in limbo that the freedom of having a car could do nothing to assuage.
We pulled into the car park at Wilverley and looked out over the plain. There are few places in the New Forest that are as vast and flat as this; the grass ran uninterrupted into the distance, nibbled to within an inch of its life by wandering ponies. In late summer, field gentians and Autumn Lady’s-tresses can be found in their thousands here.
The sun was beating down as we wandered across the plain, carefully avoiding the young foals and their protective mothers; it was yet another lovely day and with any luck I would be three more species down by dinner.
A happy-go-lucky person with a dry sense of humour, Ben was one of the first friends I made at my secondary school. We learned to play the clarinet together, though to the frustration of our teacher spent more time making each other laugh than playing music. As well as being an accomplished musician, he loves everything technical, so was always the friend to go to when your bike or laptop wasn’t working. While less enthused by nature, Ben shares my love of the outdoors and will go to great lengths to make sure he camps in the most far-flung places. Despite this, he remains terrified of horses, and kept flinching as the ponies moved closer to investigate.
We reached the other side of the plain and began walking through the heather, the parched ochre of last year’s bracken crunching noisily beneath our feet. The smack of a stonechat drew my gaze to the gorse and, sure enough, there was a handsome black-and-red male sitting on top. We continued along a grassy path and soon came across the grey-green foliage of cross-leaved heath, showing the soil here was slightly damper, and then walked right into the colony of Lesser Butterfly Orchids we had come to see.
Against the dark background of the heather, these orchids were bright and greenish white, much like their greater cousins. A pair of waxy leaves gave rise to a spike of their signature weird, ghostly-pale flowers that are somehow both graceful and elephant-like.
The English epithet ‘lesser’ is something of a misnomer as, depending on the habitat, these plants can become taller than their ‘greater’ cousins. When growing in chalk grassland, the spikes appear short and compact, whereas in deciduous woodland they will be taller, with delicate, dainty inflorescences. Here on the damp heathland of the forest, the orchid’s preferred habitat, they were somewhere in between. Interestingly, genetic analysis has shown that the two butterfly orchids are extremely closely related, suggesting that they have only recently split to form two different species. But while DNA sequence, height and form may not be the easiest characteristics for identification, the two can be easily differentiated by taking a look at the pollinia, visible as greenish lines within the flower. In the Lesser Butterfly, the two pollinia lie vertically parallel to one another, whereas the pollinia in the Greater Butterfly diverge from the top downwards, forming an inverted ‘V’ or ‘U’.
Over a month into the season, I had retuned my eye and if I knew what I was looking for – and it was relatively common – I could generally find it from a fair distance away – something that comes naturally if you are doing the same thing over and over again but seems impressive from an outsider’s point of view. Ben could not believe that I had seen the first orchid from so far away. This was also a defining moment: I had now seen twenty-six species, I was halfway there.
Aware that not everyone can spend hours looking at plants, I suggested we continue our tour of the forest with a visit to nearby Sway. Here, the heath bordered on wet boggy flushes that played host to the frilly-flowered bogbean and buttercup blooms of lesser spearwort, as well as hundreds of Heath Spotted Orchids, another new species for the year, looking extremely fresh and remarkable in their variation. I photographed tall plants with plain white flowers, tiny black-currant-coloured ones and many whose petals were daubed with calligraphic purple flourishes. Most were broad landing pads decorated with the dot-dot-dash of floral Morse code.
There are some extraordinary local names for the Spotted Orchids; in Wiltshire, they are variously known as Old Woman’s Pincushions, Kite Pans and Dandy Goslings, while in County Durham, it is Scab Gowks, and in Kent, Skeatlegs. On the Shetland Islands, they are called Curlie Daddies and in Somerset, my personal favourite, one would refer to them as Choogy Pigs.
Seed production in the Heath Spotted Orchid perfectly exemplifies the outstanding survival methods of the Orchidaceae. Webster, writing in 1898, describes how one seed capsule contains approximately 6200 seeds; as a plant will often have at least thirty capsules, each individual can therefore produce a staggering total of 186,000 seeds. These large numbers may not mean very much, so to help visualise them we can use an example from Darwin’s book on the fertilisation of orchids. Consider a single Heath Spotted Orchid. Allowing for 12,000 bad seeds, one individual would be able to produce 174,000 offspring. If each one was given fifteen square centimetres in which to grow, the progeny of a single plant would cover an acre of land – about the size of your average football pitch. If each of these 174,000 plants were to reproduce at the same rate, the resulting grandchildren would cover an area larger than Anglesey and the great-grandchildren of that one original plant would almost cover the entire landmass of our planet. So in just three generations, a single orchid has the potential to produce enough offspring to cover nearly all the land in the world. I looked around at the world-dominating assortment of Heath Spotted Orchids and wondered how many offspring they would be able to produce. Thankfully, competition from other plants keeps them at bay.
Once I’d wiggled into wellies, I began sploshing as carefully as possible across the bog, the ground sucking and gurgling underneath me with every step. My efforts were rewarded on the other side with the carnivorous pale butterwort, more Lesser Butterflies and then my third new species of the day: a Heath Fragrant Orchid. It was a weedy plant with four or five flowers perched on a small hummock that rose from the dark waters. Like the Chalk Fragrants I had found on Martin Down, its flowers were curvy and candy-floss pink. I knelt to sniff it: it was quite pleasant; spicy almost, like cloves.
This little orchid has only recently been recognised as a separate species. Originally classified within the composite ‘Fragrant Orchid’, it was first described as a distinct variety by G. C. Druce in 1918, before achieving subspecies status in 1991. Francis Rose was the key driver in unscrambling the Heath Fragrant from the Chalk and Marsh Fragrants, and I had been told by Steve Povey that it was here at Sway that he had made some of his key observations.
Rose gave them subspecies status in the first edition of his Wild Flower Key in 1981, but strongly implied they were worthy of specific status. Their full species status was finally confirmed by scientists at Kew Gardens, after DNA analysis showed strong support for the three species of Gymnadenia: conopsea (Chalk), densiflora (Marsh) and borealis (Heath), all named after their respective habitats. Unlike the other two, the Heath Fragrant doesn’t require calcareous soils and so is most often found in upland grasslands in the north and west or in boggy areas in southern Britain.
Welly-less Ben, who had been playing on his phone while I was taking photos, seemed to be regretting his request to accompany me on a trip to see orchids. Many people can look at a plant for ten seconds, some for five minutes and very few for several hours. But having found all three orchids so easily, I could tell his mind was wandering: we had seen them and now it was time to go.
Although we’d known each other for eight years, this was the first time Ben had seen me botanising, and I could tell he’d found the whole experience quite bizarre. In The Military Orchid, Jocelyn Brooke admits that he isn’t a true botanist and once accompanied a ‘real botanist to the Sandwich golf links, celebrated for a number of rare plants; it was a chilly afternoon in spring, and no weather to dawdle unless for a very good reason. My friend was in pursuit of a rare chickweed and every few yards would throw himself flat on his face and remain there, making minute comparisons, while the glacial sea wind penetrated my clothes and reduced me to a state of frozen irritability’. This experience makes him appreciate ‘how boring botanists must be to non-botanists’.
I suspect Francis Rose, in his eagerness and infectious enthusiasm, rarely failed to get even the most indifferent companions interested. Though I never met him, his ceaseless desire to find the plants he was after, and his willingness to share the experiences he’d had with others, is truly inspiring. Rose contributed so much to what we know about the British flora, extending far beyond our native orchids.