‘And few of that most curious race,
Or those that rival them in grace,
Perhaps exceed; the Ophrys kind
In the advancing season join’d,
Stamp’d with their insect imagery,
Gnat, fly, butterfly and bee,
To lure us in pursuit to rove
Through winding coombe, through shady grove.’
Bishop Richard Mant (1776–1848)
Wiltshire and Kent
June 2013
Orchids are specialists in deception. There are orchids that imitate nectar-producing flowers and entice pollinators by pretending to offer food. Others attract flies by mimicking the appearance and smell of rotting flesh. Orchids of the genus Serapias produce flowers that look like burrows for hiding in, while some tropical species pretend their flowers are male bees in flight, provoking territorial fights that result in pollination. Approximately one-third of the 25,000 orchid species have figured out that they can con animals, be it through visual, textural or aromatic deceits, or, in the case of the insect-mimicking Ophrys orchids, all three at the same time.
The genus Ophrys is famous for its sexually deceptive pollination mechanisms. Of the four species regularly found in Britain, I had already seen two: Early Spider and Fly Orchids. Their lifelike flowers had been deceiving insects throughout the spring. This system is so elaborate, so ingenious and so unthinkably clever that it has led advocates of intelligent design to use orchids as proof of the hand of a creator. It certainly highlights challenging questions about evolution. How did this mechanism become so intricate? Given natural selection’s tendency to side with simplicity, why have orchids developed such complex reproductive strategies rather than sticking with more straightforward mechanisms involving a nectar reward like most flowers? And what do the insects gain from this act of deception? What possible advantage could there be for them, in order for this whole act to have been retained by natural selection? Such a specific strategy is vulnerable to stochasticity, as many orchids are so specific they depend solely on an individual insect species: if this pollinator dies out, what does the orchid do then?
It has taken years, but evolutionary biologists have provided answers to all these questions. Pseudocopulation, to give it its scientific term, wasn’t observed until 1916, more than fifty years after Darwin published The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects. Darwin was frustrated by the seemingly purposeless extravagance of insect-mimicking orchids observed on a grassy bank near Cudham in Kent – popularly known as Darwin’s Orchis Bank. It puzzled him for years. It didn’t fit with his theories about evolution. In 1829, the Reverend Gerard E. Smith wrote: ‘The Bee-Ophrys has, indeed, the appearance of that insect, engaged in pilfering a flower; Mr Price has frequently witnessed attacks made upon the plants by a Bee, similar to those of the troublesome Apis muscorum; and I have myself seen a young entomologist, approaching stealthily, with outstretched hand, the successful deceiver, whose mimic beauty became, alas! its own ruin.’
Darwin had never seen any insect visit the Bee Orchid, which has abandoned the traditional mechanism in favour of self-pollination, but was puzzled as to why Mr Price’s bee was attacking the flower. Where did this little plant fit in his theory of natural selection? How had natural selection shaped a flower that resembled an insect so successfully that it could fool an entomologist?
Fast forward 150 years, and we know that orchids are more devious and cunning than Darwin ever suspected. The bee described by Smith was not attacking the flower, but trying to mate with it. Research carried out on Ophrys speculum by Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne, a French colonial judge in Algiers, helped shed light on Darwin’s conundrum. Once the insect lands on the orchid, Pouyanne noticed that ‘the abdomen tip becomes agitated against these hairs with messy, almost convulsive movements, and the insect wiggles around’. While investigating this behaviour, he realised that all the visiting insects were male and that those messy, convulsive movements only occurred in the few weeks before the females hatched. After conducting numerous experiments in order to establish the source of the attraction, Pouyanne concluded that the insects’ movements were analogous to those of insects attempting copulation.
A few years later, an Australian naturalist by the name of Edith Coleman independently came up with a similar idea. Upon discovering the works of Pouyanne and a British naturalist, Colonel Masters John Godfery, who had confirmed the Frenchman’s results, she synthesised a more detailed account of this phenomenon. She was the first to conclusively prove these ideas by finding wasp semen on her flowers. These three botanists had independently arrived at the same conclusion: that insects mistook the orchid flowers for females of their species and were trying to have sex with them. The orchids had evolved to exploit the short period of time between the emergence of the males and the emergence of the females.
So why have these strategies developed? Why move away from offering a nectar reward? There have been studies showing that if the pollinator doesn’t immediately find what it’s looking for it thrashes about in search of the food or mate it’s sure is there, in doing so increasing the odds that it’ll unwittingly pick up the pollen. Other studies suggest that it’s to do with dispersal. When nectar was added to orchids that normally didn’t provide it, the pollinators began hanging around. They would visit other flowers on the same plant, and other plants in the vicinity. This results in inbreeding, which is ideally avoided as it decreases the health of its offspring. The frustration of the pollinator is key in this system, encouraging the bee to leave quickly and fly a fair distance before trying another plant. It favours mixing genes with far-flung individuals which are less likely to be closely related. Having such a specific sexually motivated strategy, targeting one or two pollinator species might seem unstable, but actually there may be benefits. Nectar attracts everyone and anyone, meaning a lot of your pollen will probably be delivered to the wrong species. By attracting a very specific species, you improve the odds that your pollen will be delivered to your own kind.
Interestingly, the Bee Orchid, Ophrys apifera, has long since given up trying to lure insects to its flowers. Instead, it is routinely self-pollinated, despite clearly having evolved to attract male bees as pollinators. Botanists have puzzled over why this might be. The most likely scenario is that sometime in the fairly recent past, the particular bee that pollinated the Bee Orchid became extinct. In order to survive, the Bee had to make a dramatic lifestyle change. Another possibility is that the pollinator switched from feeding on the Bee Orchid to another plant, perhaps a different Ophrys species. In any case, this switch doesn’t seem to have affected its welfare, as it remains widespread in England and across Europe. Inbreeding leaves it vulnerable, though, and the effects of climate change may well have a disastrous impact on Bee Orchid populations in the future.
Despite its aura of rarity, the Bee Orchid is actually quite easy to find and is often discovered in new locations. Most regularly occurring in short-turf pasture and chalk downland, it is associated with earthworks and old quarries. Man-made habitats are particularly popular, such as railway embankments, roadsides and industrial estates. These locations are perhaps the last places you would expect to find orchids.
I had chosen to search for the Bee Orchid in the grounds of Salisbury District Hospital. In my hand, I was clutching the hastily scribbled directions received from the woman I had met while looking for Burnt Orchids three weeks previously. People take great pride and feel very protective of their local Bee Orchids. For those with a passing interest in wildlife, the discovery of a small cluster of these plants is an exciting occasion. She claimed to have seen more than sixty plants there last year, so I figured it was worth a shot. Established Bee Orchid populations are notorious for the dramatic fluctuations in the number of flowering plants from year to year, so there was a chance I might not find any. Unlike the Lady’s Slipper, the Bee Orchid is very short-lived.
It felt odd to be walking into the grounds of a hospital on a warm Friday afternoon in search of orchids. There were long queues of cars arriving for visiting hours, interspersed at intervals by ambulances. Although they are relatively common, I had only seen eight Bee Orchids in my life, and all of them had been growing in old, species-rich grassland.
Reaching the entrance, I glanced down at my crumpled sheet of paper. Walk into the reception area and head straight down the corridor in front of you, taking a left after the double doors. This was the strangest orchid hunt I had ever been on. Doing as instructed, I turned the corner, dodging doctors and nurses as they hurried past. At the end of the corridor turn left again, then right, before passing through two doors. I complied, suddenly realising that I was following these instructions blindly, not stopping to check whether I was actually allowed there. No sooner had the thought entered my mind, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Excuse me, are you lost? You’re not allowed through there,’ said the doctor. I had just been about to pass through a third door. Apologising profusely, I backed up and felt her watching me suspiciously as I walked away. Paying closer attention to the directions, I followed them all the way through to a second reception area on the other side of the hospital. I walked back out into the glaring sunshine. A large sign by the door read ‘Welcome to Salisbury District Hospital’. This was clearly the main entrance.
Still wondering why I’d been sent on a journey through the labyrinth of hospital corridors rather than directly to the front door, I spotted a steep grassy bank in between two of the car parks: probably a good place to start. Within ten seconds, I had found my first Bee Orchid. One minute later, I had clocked at least twenty.
Consumed by childlike curiosity, I sat down next to a group of seven plants clustered around the bottom of a lamp-post. At the centre of three bubblegum-pink sepals, the lip sits velvety and bee-like. Its furry surface is a rich chocolate brown, overlain with a mix of irregular yellow lines and splodges. An inner purplish-brown loop outlines a base of cinnamon. The other two petals are rolled into long lime antennae either side of the green column which rises from the flower, culminating in what can only be described as a duck’s head. This is where the yellow pollinia are produced and I could see some of them hanging down and swinging gently in the wind. Some had already stuck to the stigma: self-pollination in action.
The plant’s English and Latin names clearly both refer to its resemblance to a bee. The specific name apifera is derived from the Latin apis, meaning ‘bee’, and fero, meaning ‘to bear’ or ‘to carry’; together they mean ‘bee-bearing’. European names also follow this trend: in France it is ‘Ophrys abeille’, in Germany Bienen Ragwurz, or bee ragweed, and in Italy Vesparia, meaning ‘wasp’. In Britain, local names include Bee-flower in Wiltshire, Honey-flower in Kent and Bumble-bee in Devon and Somerset. In Dorset, it is known as the Humble-bee Flower and in Surrey it is a Dumble Dor. John Gerard, who was the first to record this species in 1597, calls it the Humble Bee Orchis. Humble, I thought, was a fitting adjective.
I moved from Bee to Bee, taking in all the intricate differences between each flower that made them unique. I found one which had unrolled a little golden stinger at the tip, but instead of looking threatening it reminded me of our cat Tabitha when she forgets some of her tongue is sticking out. Some were much paler than others, with pastel-pink sepals. I was struck by how happy each flower looked. This was definitely Britain’s friendliest orchid.
As it was visiting time at the hospital, there was a steady stream of people walking past me. By now I was immune to the stares and mutterings of passers-by, but I was surprised no one asked what I was doing. I wondered whether any patients would be hearing about the boy on the bank.
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It was a text from Dom Price with exciting news. He had been walking around Figsbury Ring that morning with his family when his wife, Susie, had found a Bee Orchid on the ramparts. I almost dropped my phone in excitement. I had looked for them at Figsbury every summer since I had first found one there in 2001, but had never had any luck. How appropriate, I thought, that it had chosen this summer to reappear.
I dropped in at Figsbury on my way home. Once considered an Iron Age hillfort, Figsbury Ring is now thought to have been a Neolithic henge. Instead of serving as a defensive structure, it would have been used for ritualistic purposes, like Stonehenge, which isn’t far away. People still process around the circular earthwork rings, children and dogs running along the chalky path, though unobservant of any sort of ritual.
There was just a single Bee growing on the raised earthwork amid hundreds of Chalk Fragrant Orchids and a cloud of gentian-blue milkwort. It was spectacular, somehow far brighter and more handsome than the plants up at the hospital. This one had two bees, resting peacefully on candyfloss-pink flowers. Their patterned flowers were more yellow than brown, and I wondered whether they might be a named variety.
There are six named varieties of Bee Orchid: individuals with distinct patterns that occur frequently enough to warrant nomenclatural recognition. One, called chlorantha, is ghostly pale with white sepals and a greenish-yellow lip. Bicolor has a plain yellow petal that looks like it’s been dipped in melted chocolate, and trollii, also known as the Wasp Orchid, has a narrow lip that tapers to a sharp point. The Bee in front of me looked like it could be a belgarum, with a horizontal band of yellow across the middle.
The Bee Orchid is one of the surprisingly few British species that has inspired its own poem. Two stanzas by Langhorne describe these little bees settled in front of me:
Two days later, I woke up in a very hot tent. Outside, I could hear the voice of a boy talking urgently into a walky-talky: “We need to move now. I’ll meet you by the washing area. The girls are in the woods, but we don’t have much time. Over.” I rolled over. It sounded too risky to go outside just yet.
I was back in Kent, at the very south-eastern tip of Britain, and had come to find two of Britain’s coolest flowers: Lizard and Late Spider Orchids. I had never seen either of these species and was unimaginably excited.
Crawling out of the tent five minutes later, I took in the bright-blue, cloudless sky and the morning sun flooding the campsite. Down below, the English Channel glittered invitingly. It was going to be another beautiful day and, according to the weather forecast, the hottest of the year so far.
Piling my tent into the back of the car, I trundled out of the campsite and drove the eight miles to Sandwich Bay. It was 10:30am and I was full of anticipation as I set off down a narrow dusty path to the sea. Sandwich Bay is a largely inactive dune system and is home to several rare species. It is perhaps most famous for holding the largest Lizard Orchid population in the country. Curiously, they grow all over the Royal St George golf course.
The footpath led me through the dunes and onto the golf course. A sign reading ‘Please be aware of golfers approaching from the right’ seemed to have missed the point as a small white ball went whizzing past.
Pausing to let a couple of mid-morning golfers tee off, I spotted a small tortoiseshell on the path in front of me. Its wings were a palette of orange and yellow with a border of blue sapphires. I approached carefully, but disturbed it. It flicked up and swooped twice around me before disappearing over the marram.
I passed through a corridor of viper’s-bugloss, an electric-blue guard of honour. By the path grew several broomrapes of varying sizes. Broomrapes are odd-looking plants that are parasitic on the roots of other species. These were bedstraw broomrape, parasitic on bright-yellow lady’s bedstraw, and smelled wonderfully sweet, of clover. This little plant is incredibly rare and, it turned out, can only be found here on the east coast of Kent. Not a bad rarity to stumble across. Further on there were more good finds: pin-striped funnels of sea bindweed, juicy-leaved biting stonecrop and some Pyramidal Orchids standing out like beacons in the grass.
The Lizard Orchid was first recorded in 1641 in Mercurius botanicus by Thomas Johnson. He found it ‘nigh the highway betweene Crayford and Dartford in Kent’. From the 1600s right through until about 1850, it was restricted to this area and, due to habitat destruction and over-collecting, by the turn of the nineteenth century the Lizard had been reduced to just four sites. But then things took an unprecedented turn. In the subsequent thirty years, it dramatically expanded its range, establishing thirty-six populations as far west as Devon and north to Yorkshire. Being on the edge of its range in England, it appears that small changes in climate have a significant impact on its distribution. Fortunately, the Sandwich Bay population seems to have thrived under protection. Because of the threat posed by collectors, this colony was under twenty-four-hour guard during the 1970s and 1980s.
A couple of yachts, triangular smudges on the water, had ventured around the headland from Margate and were making their way along the horizon. The warm air was being bandied about by a light breeze and had picked up the clove-like scent of the bedstraw broomrape. Suddenly though, as the wind changed direction, I was hit by a revolting, pungent farmyard animal smell that made me wrinkle my nose in disgust. What on earth was that? Glancing to my left, I got my answer: Lizard Orchids.
Holding my breath, I darted over and knelt down to examine these bizarre flowers. Lizard Orchids are unmistakeable. Their robust spikes of greyish-green flowers are commonly about thirty centimetres tall and at first sight appear crowded, ragged and untidy. Hooded by pale-green sepals, the lip is long and quickly fades from white to maroon-brown as it corkscrews through two or three turns, ending with a notch at the tip some seven or eight centimetres away from the plant. It supposedly resembles the tail and hindquarters of a lizard,: however the front half appears to have been swallowed by the flower. When inside the bud, this ‘tail’ is coiled up like a spring. At the base of the lip, where it is still white, there are small pink dots which resemble little faces.
In many ways far from the beauty and fragility one associates with the word orchid, the Lizard is a heavyweight. Exploring the dunes, I found many that exceeded sixty centimetres. A handful of enormous gangly spikes down by the road were all a metre tall. These plants were hipsters, with their scraggly beards of brown, coiled lizard tails. In The Wild Orchids of Britain, Jocelyn Brooke describes the whole plant as having ‘a distinctly uncanny and sinister air, and were it more familiar, one would not be surprised to see it forming part of the Freudian dream-patterns of the surrealist painter’.
The smell was making me feel sick. Anne Pratt was quick to label it ‘perfectly disgusting’, while a friend of Jocelyn Brooke’s who served in the First World War claimed that the plant smelled like the battlefield. To most people they smell of billy goat. The species Latin name, Himantoglossum hircinum, makes reference to the strap-like lip (himas is ‘strap-like’ and glossa means ‘tongue’, giving us Himantoglossum) and to the goat-like smell (hircinus means ‘of a goat’). Interestingly, the French name for this species, Orchis bouc, is a further reference to goats, while in Kent it is locally known as the Great Goat-stones. The Goat Orchid, though, doesn’t have the same ring to it, nor does it conjure up quite as exotic an image.
In Wildflowers of Chalk and Limestone, Ted Lousley gives an account of his friend, John Jacob, who became completely obsessed with Lizard Orchids in the late nineteenth century. ‘It is not surprising that such an erratic and bizarre plant has held an irresistible fascination for at least one Man of Kent. My friend John Jacob of Dover made the quest for “Lizzies” his life work from the time he saw his first in 1885. For twenty-five consecutive years of those that followed he never missed a season without seeing the plant somewhere or other. The list of localities he wrote out for me before his death is a long one. There can be little doubt that he held the record for having seen the greatest number of “Lizzies” in England.’
John Jacob’s talent for tracking down Lizard Orchids was unrivalled. One outing with Lousley in 1925 resulted in them discovering just how bad its scent was. ‘Earlier that year,’ Lousley writes, ‘two elderly ladies had found what they took to be a wild Aspidistra; they dug it up and kept it in a pot at their home. Towards the end of June it came into flower, and they then realised that they had found something very much out of the ordinary and tried to get the plant named. Their inquiries came to Jacob’s notice and he called on the ladies and collected the plant with the object of placing it on show in Dover Museum. We took the plant on the train together and during the journey gained practical experience of a feature of the Lizard Orchid which was new even to Jacob. In the ordinary way in the open air in daytime the most unpleasant smell given off by the flowers is not noticeable [I beg to differ]. On this occasion it proved to be exceedingly objectionable, and the reminiscence of the he-goat implied by the scientific name hircinum was shown to be well founded. Our journey took us through lengthy tunnels in which the carriage windows were closed in accordance with custom, and on this warm summer day the smell was overpowering. If the ladies who dug up this rare orchid in ignorance had kept it in their house they would have met with a just reward!’
Thankful not to be in a confined space with these plants, though not convinced Lousley had ever experienced them outdoors, I reached the other side of the golf course. I was amazed by the sheer volume of Lizard Orchids. Despite its rarity, the Lizard is an adaptable species and has often been recorded in strange places: there are regular records of it popping up in people’s front lawns and there is a well-known colony spread across the racecourse at Newmarket. It’s almost as if it got fed up of waiting to be found in remote locations.
I began following the road along the beach. Sea-kale and common mallow grew in tidy, organised islands in the shingle. I spotted the blue-green plastic leaves of sea-holly among yellow rattle and seeding sea sandwort and lanky wild asparagus growing like spindly trees.
The road was lined with Lizard Orchids. Some were short and stunted hidden in the long grass, while others were enormous towers of grey, green and various hues of brown; my favourites were a dark chocolate burgundy. I found drooping lizards with tails twisting like fusilli, plants that wagged their tails in the wind like dogs, and some whose tails looked more like the unrolled proboscis of a moth or butterfly. One of the highlights of the day was coming across a spike that had its ‘ribbon-like streamers’, as C. B. Tahourdin calls them, stuck out on end like hair filled with static electricity. A Mr G. Chichester Oxenden described the Lizard as the ‘Monarch of Orchids’ and provided the specimens used by Darwin in his description of the species in his book on the fertilisation of orchids. They were extremely special plants and I was utterly enchanted.
Several hours later, having dragged myself away from the Lizards, I found myself high up on the chalk hills of Kent. The time had come to look for Late Spider Orchids, the fourth and final insect-imitating Ophrys species. Its specific name fuciflora literally means ‘deceitful flower’.
Late Spiders are unthinkably rare. Restricted to Kent, their small populations are limited to fewer than ten sites, only five of which will reliably produce flowering spikes every year. Around 50 per cent of the British population grow near Wye, east of Ashford, and droves of orchid tourists flock there every June to admire them through their wire cage prisons. Although the enclosures are constructed to protect against rabbits rather than humans, I didn’t consider a hillside covered in mesh cages a fitting introduction to one of the coolest orchids in the country, so I decided to track it down elsewhere.
I had driven through Dover and parked up on the downs with a picture-postcard view out over a sparkling sea. The hillside below was a long stretch of steep, rolling fields. Small hollows had been carved out from the slopes where landslips had occurred, leaving snowy drifts of chalk. The result was a downland full of secret pockets, all calling out to be explored.
Remarkably, the first British record of a Late Spider Orchid dates from 1828, when it was noted ‘on the southern declivities of chalky downs near Folkestone’ by the same Reverend Gerard E. Smith whose observations on the interaction between bee and Bee Orchid had so puzzled Darwin. Given its rarity, it is hardly surprising this species wasn’t recorded until the nineteenth century. In fact, it is possible that an ameliorating climate helped a seedling establish itself after being blown over from the continent, and it has been here ever since. This might explain why it is restricted to this tiny corner of Kent.
Five minutes along the path and I was already deep into one of the clefts incised into the hillside. It was full of common wildflowers: fairy flax, horseshoe vetch, yellow-wort and mouse-ear hawkweed and dotted with Common Spotted Orchids. In the remains of an archaeological settlement, I found Pyramidal Orchids and a few Bee Orchids, their friendly faces smiling up at me.
Thirty minutes later and I was still searching. Conscious of the long journey home, I decided to give up and try elsewhere. As I trudged back to the car, exhaustion creeping up on me, I was surprised to stumble across a cluster of Man Orchids. They were well past their best, but nevertheless provided a happy flashback to my evening on Darland Banks. I hadn’t expected to see them again so soon.
And then I spotted the Late Spider Orchids: crisp and intensely coloured. Late Spiders are more closely related to Bee Orchids than Early Spiders and this is evident in the flowers. The oval sepals were the same candyfloss-pink, with a prominent green line running down the middle. However, the Spider’s two non-specialised petals were different from the Bee’s: small, dark pink and furry. They looked like horns, some the deep red of strontium flames. The spider’s lip was squarer than the Bee’s, and a rich chestnut brown with a golden tip. Each one had a different Aztec-like symbol emblazoned across its back. It was inherently obvious why their velvety surfaces were so attractive to insects.
Unlike the Bee’s, the Late Spiders were feisty, almost aggressive in their showmanship. They’re rare and they knew it, as if they would immediately challenge anyone or anything in the vicinity. Unfortunately, they’re becoming even rarer. The Late Spider is pollinated by insects, but their pollinators – certain solitary bees in the genus Eucera – no longer exist in the UK, meaning very few flowers are pollinated. This begs the question: how do they survive in Britain? Self-pollination may occur occasionally, or pollination by other insects like pollen-beetles, although this has never been observed. It seems that individual plants are long-lived.
One of my former biology teachers, Paul Collins, noted that the long-horned bee, Eucera longicornis, has been recorded occasionally along the south coast of England, presumably mostly a result of strong south winds carrying it over the English Channel. He found this highly amusing, commenting: ‘I bet the males that do make it are frustrated as hell by the lack of females to mate with and are very grateful to find some extremely rare bee porn.’ I think he was probably right.
Who knows what the future holds for the Late Spider Orchid? Will climate change devastate their tiny populations in this corner of Kent? Or will they adapt and start attracting some other helpless insect species? Even now, they could be following in the Bee Orchid’s footsteps and slowly moving towards self-pollination. Only time will tell, but I hope they stick around; I have seldom come across such an inventive plant.
To appreciate the intricate, deceptive charm of the Ophrys orchids is to admire one of evolution’s finest products. Natural selection, through random chance, has come up with a system that allows a plant to exploit one of an animal’s most urgent needs: sex. But it makes you wonder who else orchids have duped. Have we, who assume superior intelligence, actually been tricked into becoming arguably the most important orchid pollinators in the world? Propagating them, continuing genetic lines and passing on precious genes to the next generation on their slow but purposeful march towards botanical domination? Our actions have allowed orchids to exploit a range of new habitats: supermarkets, florists, perhaps your living room windowsill. We’ve spent all this time mocking the intelligence of a handful of hapless insects when it is perhaps us who are the real fools.