‘The handsomest and most interesting flowers were the great purple orchises, rising ever and anon, with their great purple spikes perfectly erect, amid the shrubs and grasses of the shore.’
Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864)
Yorkshire and North Uist
July 2013
The moorland was bathed in the purple of midsummer heather. Beside me, a liquorice-coloured stream ran down the hill, its dark peat banks lined with waxy rushes and cushions of moss. Appearing from nowhere, a short-eared owl ghosted across the moor, impervious to the buffeting wind, and made its way towards me, flapping silently.
Turning my head to follow its flight, I picked out the fiery pink flowers of rosebay willowherb and suddenly I was ten years old again, playing hide-and-seek among the boulders that lay scattered on the hilltop. My family and I spent hours here every summer. My sisters and I used to play in the sandstone quarries or help pick bilberries on the steep slopes to take home for pudding. We would return with ice cream tubs full to the brim, our mouths and fingers stained with tell-tale purple.
I was back in Haworth, taking a short break before continuing my journey north to Scotland. After a morning inside reading, I was making the most of the afternoon sunshine. I began wandering down the track towards the road. Fine dust billowed up in clouds as I walked, the consequence of a string of hot, dry days. To my left the stream flowed slowly: brown water seeped through boggy flushes and trickled over miniature waterfalls formed by stones lodged in the peat. The grass beside it was pebbled with sheep’s droppings. The fluffy heads of cotton-grass, bobbing like rabbit’s tails in the breeze, mingled with sneezewort, meadowsweet and tiny yellow tormentil.
As I walked, meadow pipits flitted along the dry-stone wall, always one step ahead of me. A battered wooden signpost directed me onwards: Brontë Falls 2 ½ miles. The sandy track extended, and across the valley, stone walls created a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of green fields, with small houses dotted here and there.
Reaching the end of the track, I turned onto the road and started walking back down the hill towards Haworth. As I descended, I began noticing orchids growing in the damp grass. They were Northern Marsh Orchids, my thirty-sixth species of the year.
Of all the marsh orchids, this species is fairly easy to identify: the lip of the flower forms a deep-magenta diamond and is scrawled with red loops and swirls. Most plants have a tightly packed inflorescence and are richly coloured. No other marsh orchid has the dark crimson overtones of the Northern Marsh. The leaves on these plants were unmarked and a bright, polished green.
As the name suggests, this species has a northerly distribution. It is commonly found growing in marshy grassland across the north of England, Wales and Ireland, and is a regular feature of Scottish meadows. Interestingly, it has very little overlap with the Southern Marsh Orchid, which is the dominant marsh orchid in the south. There is a small band running diagonally upwards from Wales to south Yorkshire where the two species meet and occasionally hybridise. Curiously, it was one of the later additions to the British orchid flora: it wasn’t recognised as an individual species until it was described from a sighting of plants near Aberystwyth in 1920.
The roadside was cluttered with rich spikes of Northern Marsh Orchid. I stepped gingerly through the colony. I couldn’t linger: I had to continue north, up into Scotland and west to the Outer Hebrides. I was on the hunt for the Hebridean Marsh Orchid, one of the most localised species in the British Isles.
The next two days were spent driving through Scotland. I camped on the shores of Loch Lomond, passed through Crianlarich and Fort William, and stopped on the roadside far more than I had planned in order to admire Scotland’s wonderful scenery. As I proceeded, the mountains rose up around me, the no-man’s-land between them washed lilac with heather. Lakes and tarns were pooled across the landscape. Ben Nevis was still peaked with snow.
As I turned west towards the Hebrides, the sun seemed to fade, shrouded by wisps of cloud, before disappearing altogether. It began to rain as I reached Skye. I flicked my lights and windscreen wipers on. Forty minutes later, the rain had set in and was coming down in drizzly sheets. I had pulled into a small layby up on the moors and was shivering as the air temperature plummeted. The prospect of camping in this weather was depressing.
When I arrived at the small village of Uig, the cloud was so low that I could only see ten metres ahead. I bumped up the pot-holed track, dispersing puddles of cloudy water. I sat in the car, willing the weather to turn, but it was miserable and so was I.
As I got out of the car, the mud squelched thick and brown under my feet. There weren’t many campers about, but there were several caravans lined up against the fence. I gazed enviously at the warm glow coming from the one nearest me. I unpacked my tent, still damp from the previous night, and began pegging it out, using the car as a windshield. Midges swarmed around my head. After wolfing down some pasta, I retired to the car. I was cold and lonely and sat there longing for company.
I called home and whimpered to my parents, who tried their best to console me. It was twenty degrees warmer at home. England was experiencing a heatwave and my family had spent the afternoon sending photos of ice cream, sunbathing and G&Ts. At that moment, I couldn’t have cared less about orchids: I wanted to be at home, warm and dry.
Over the next hour or so, I watched as the rain died away and the cloud began to shift. The wall of greyish white that had surrounded the campsite was fading and I could just about make out silhouettes beyond: dark, shapeless masses and moving lights. Above me, a small Scottish flag rippled aggressively in the wind as if struggling to free itself from its rusty post.
Eventually, as the mist cleared, I realised I was looking out over the sea. The lights I had seen were coming from a bullish ferry that was now sitting in the harbour, humming loudly as it prepared for its final journey of the day.
As I stood there, the last layer of cloud was sucked away and sunlight, pure and bright, streamed down over the large hills that backed onto the campsite. Boats moored to the jetty were now brilliantly coloured: red, yellow, orange and blue. Down on the shore, the sun’s rays penetrated deep into the water and transformed a brown mass of seaweed into glinting shapes of green, ochre and auburn that swirled with the slow current.
I was freezing and couldn’t feel my toes. Across the harbour, I could hear a gentle clinking as rigging met mast. I watched as the ferry chugged past, dragging itself out into the open water and setting its course for the Outer Hebrides. First thing in the morning, it would return and I would board for the last leg of my journey to North Uist.
Waves rolled in lazily over the pale-blue sea, crashing onto a stark-white beach. The bleached sand seemed to stretch for miles and curved out and round as it followed the arc of the bay. In the distance, the islands of Lewis and Harris were dark smudges on the horizon. The hill, awash with clover and buttercups, sloped gently down to the sand dunes which rose and fell as far as the eye could see. Grey-green marram grass covered the slopes. Behind the dunes was an extensive area of low-lying grassland. Atlantic storms blow sand and fragments of shells over the dunes and onto the coastal grassland beyond. The result is short, species-rich turf. This habitat is known as machair and is unique to western Scotland and parts of Ireland.
It had gone midday by the time I arrived at Clachan Shannda, a tiny village in the north of the island. I had driven down to a small cemetery and parked on the grass, then followed a stony track that disappeared enticingly over the hill. I was now standing at the top of that hill, thrilled by the beauty of the Hebrides. The landscape before me felt raw and untouched.
I skipped down the slope in gleeful anticipation of the botanising ahead and took a narrow sandy path behind the dunes in the direction of the Machair Walk. Progress was slow as there were so many plants to look at: common stork’s-bill, sand sedge, wild pansies and tiny blue bugloss. The small white flowers of thyme-leaved sandwort twinkled at me from the darker sand and Northern Marsh Orchids spilled across the path. I checked each one, hoping to find the Hebridean speciality I had come for. I was completely in my element and lost all track of time.
The Hebridean Marsh Orchid is an enigma. It was first discovered in 1936 by M. S. Campbell, and was originally thought to belong to the amalgamation called Western Marsh Orchid (this included what is now the Irish Marsh Orchid). During the latter half of the twentieth century, it went through names like wildfire, until it was eventually granted full species status, as Dactylorhiza ebudensis. After I had drawn up the species list for my trip, it underwent another change: a demotion from species to variety. It is currently known as Dactylorhiza traunsteinerioides ssp. francis-drucei var. ebudensis, or in English: a kind of Pugsley’s Marsh Orchid. Dom Price pointed out there should be a rule against Latin names this long and he hoped I found it faster than it took me to say it. As a result of this name change, I had been in a dilemma over whether or not I would come to the Outer Hebrides to see this orchid at all. But after deliberating, I decided that as it had been a full species when I was planning my trip, it would remain on my list of species to track down.
Back on the machair, I was startled by the loud squeak of a lapwing overhead. It swooped down low before shooting skywards again, mobbing me. The further I walked, the more frequent these warning calls became until I was subject to constant attention from three or four birds. I was obviously getting perilously close to their nests. The correct thing to have done would have been to turn back and walk away, but that would have meant leaving the machair and I hadn’t travelled all this way to be nice to a few lapwings.
Keeping an eye out for nests, I tried my best to ignore the high-pitched squeals from the sky. I looked around me and grinned: the machair was dotted with hundreds of marsh orchids, and not just purple ones, but pink, red, white and every shade in between. There were Early Marsh Orchids everywhere: both the brick-red dune slack specialist coccinea, and the flesh-coloured subspecies incarnata. In some cases, it became difficult to tell which was which. One spike looked like an ice lolly, pale pink at the base and slowly getting darker at the top. The identity of that one was anyone’s guess.
The genus Dactylorhiza, to which all the marsh orchids belong, hybridises for fun. I had seen a few hybrids on my travels, but most of them had been rare and easy to identify: Lady x Monkey Orchids and Sword-leaved x White Helleborines. The parent species of those hybrids had been present and the plants were clearly intermediate between the two. The marsh orchid hybrids, on the other hand, don’t follow either of these rules. In most cases, only one parent species is present, and in many cases neither parent can be found. The hybrid itself often looks nothing like either parent. In such a large colony of marsh orchids, like the one here, hybridisation was inevitable.
That such extensive interspecific breeding is possible is down to genetics. The marsh orchids are all very closely related as, on a geological timescale, they only split into separate species very recently. While they remain genetically similar, they can hybridise. Over thousands of years, however, small changes to their DNA will accumulate, and the species will become increasingly different. Eventually, long after you and I are gone, the species will be so different that they will no longer be sexually compatible – and therefore won’t produce hybrids. It gets more complicated, though, as fertile hybrids can themselves become new species. The Hebridean Marsh Orchid is thought to be the result of a long-ago hybridisation event between Early Marsh and Common Spotted Orchids. Whether a hybrid becomes a new species or not is dependent on a long list of environmental and genetic factors, too tedious to rehearse.
I thought the plants in front of me were probably a cross between Northern Marsh and Heath Spotted Orchids. While the former was present in numbers, the latter was nowhere to be seen. The grassland was rich in calcium: a Heath Spotted Orchid’s worst nightmare. Its absence didn’t rule it out, though. Perhaps, I wondered, it could be the hybrid between Northern Marsh and Common Spotted? There were certainly Common Spotted Orchids around, although only a few. They were a special Hebridean form with more heavily pigmented petals and accentuated concentric looping patterns.
It was while trying to come to a conclusion that I laid eyes upon my first few Hebridean Marsh Orchids. I had driven more than 700 miles to see this dumpy purple plant. It looked remarkably similar to the Northern Marsh Orchid, but was more stunted and its lip was three-lobed rather than fashioned into a diamond shape. It was also a deep, royal purple, unlike the reddish purple of Northern Marsh, and its leaves were invariably splotched with large uneven patches of dark brown. The most distinguishing feature was that all the flowers on the inflorescence faced the same way. From one angle, the plant looked like it was in full flower; from the opposite side it appeared to lack flowers completely. This was a bizarre phenomenon that I had also observed in the Dense-flowered Orchid and Pugsley’s Marsh Orchid in Ireland.
Delighted by my find and relieved to have found it relatively quickly, I continued to explore the machair. A trio of Early Marsh Orchids stopped me in my tracks and I bent down clumsily to photograph them. I have a knack of getting into awkward and painful positions while taking photos, too absorbed in the moment to care.
Taking stock, I stood to relieve my aching limbs. The fields beyond were misty with clover. I had been watching a herd of highland cattle drift around their pasture throughout the afternoon. They were close enough to the fence for me to hear the quiet snuffling as they tugged at the turf. In the distance, there were three white cottages with slanting brown roofs and old red doors. The hills rose up behind them, their surfaces pocked with slivers of exposed granite.
I knelt down to look at some marsh arrowgrass near a small stream and suddenly spotted a single Frog Orchid growing in the sandy soil. It was so small and green that even my trained eye had almost missed it. It came as a surprise: I hadn’t considered the possibility I might find one up here.
Varying in colour from mostly green to very red, Frog Orchids tuck their frog flowers out of sight, camouflaging themselves among the surrounding vegetation. Their flowers are bent backwards so far that they are frequently more or less horizontal. A certain amount of imagination is required in order to see the animal in the flower, but the lip is said to resemble a frog in full hop. Even if this is beyond the observer, certain parallels can be drawn with their colour and introverted nature. The sepals were reddish and hooded the frog, trying desperately to keep it concealed. Another, more mundane name for this plant is the Bracted Green Orchid: efficient and to the point, but rather unimaginative.
Despite looking nothing like marsh orchids, genetic analysis has shown that Frog Orchids are also part of the genus Dactylorhiza. This makes sense when you consider the frequency with which the Frog Orchid hybridises with other species of Dactylorhiza. The hybrid with Common Spotted Orchid has been widely recorded, while it has also been known to cross with Heath Spotted and, very rarely, Northern Marsh Orchids.
The Frog was first recorded in 1650 by William How in his Phytologia Britannica. John Ray also included it in his flora of Cambridgeshire in 1660, and six years later, Christopher Merrett wrote of it growing near Oxford and Lewes. It has a widespread, if patchy, distribution across the UK and is generally commoner in the north, particularly Scotland. Strangely, it is completely absent from Kent and only has a few records from pre-1970.
My phone was buzzing away in my pocket: Andy Murray was attempting to win his first Wimbledon title and I was missing it. My father was texting me regular updates. Unfortunately, the phone signal was patchy at best, so every twenty minutes I received a barrage of messages:
30-15
40-15
game to Murray!!
I was desperate to watch the match.
After a picnic lunch, I crossed over the stream, stopping only to have a look at the sea-milkwort that grew in some dried-out ruts. There were more Frog Orchids here and an impressive collection of Early Marsh Orchid subspecies. A flock of waders whizzed past. My father would have been able to identify them, I was sure, but I was too out of touch with this group of birds. Plovers, perhaps? The squealing lapwings were giving me a headache.
North Uist was wild. Truly wild. Not the ‘wild’ we are promised by nature reserves, but the original, untouched ‘wild’ associated with the extreme Scottish islands. The only signs of civilisation were the tiny ramshackle huts. The nearest city was a very long way away. Instead of silence, the island was filled with the sound of nature: insects chirping, wind rustling the marram, and even those pesky lapwings. Finally, orchid hunting at its best.
The serenity of the machair and surrounding landscape was deeply calming. I found a warm, sandy hollow halfway up the dunes and sat gazing out to sea. The small, uninhabited island of Lingeigh guarded the bay, its rugged shores beckoning invitingly. The sea was a pale turquoise, lightened by the white sand underneath. The sun, which had been battling the clouds all day, had just begun to seep through the haze and was quickly warming the air. All around me insects were buzzing and hopping. One lilac tufted vetch flower next to me had five black-and-red burnet moths clustered on it, all enjoying the plentiful nectar and completely oblivious to the satisfying click of my camera. More texts suddenly burst through.
30-30
30-40
Murray has broken Djokovic!
I walked back through the dunes, discovering more Frog Orchids of amazing diversity in the scrubbier areas between the sandy bunkers. There were dark-red ones that stood twenty centimetres from the ground, alongside a tiny five-centimetre-tall plant that was incredibly green, save for the lip of each flower, which was chocolate brown.
Slipping through a bank of marram and sea rocket, I jumped down to the beach and walked along the tideline, awestruck at the expanse of brilliant white sand. At the end of the beach, where sand met shingle, I pottered among the stones and boulders. North Uist is primarily made up of banded Lewisian gneiss and pinkish granite. Some of the rocks here are three billion years old. On a whim, I picked up a fragment and tucked it into my pocket: a small memento of my afternoon on the machair.
Murray’s two sets up.
Nail biter.
Turning to leave, I caught a glimpse of an oystercatcher floating over the sea. It passed behind a rocky crag and emerged again, the sunlight playing across its dark back. I followed it as it sailed across the horizon before it disappeared behind the hill, its cries suddenly muffled and then gone altogether.
I had been distracted by something as I followed the wader’s flight. I glanced around, trying to work out what I’d seen. There in the grass: a purple orchid. Its flower spike was longer than that of the marsh orchids but the colour not nearly so royal. Each lip was extended, drawn out. I couldn’t quite believe it, but I had found the Frog x Northern Marsh Orchid hybrid. I jumped around, surprising myself with my excitement. This was a ridiculously rare plant.
My only sadness was that there was no one around with whom to share my find. I was leaping around, but there wasn’t even a passing stranger to whom I could show it. Once again, I felt the longing for an equally enthusiastic friend to accompany me on trips to see plants, but I knew it was extremely unlikely to ever happen. The number of young people interested in plants is dwindling rapidly. Interest in botany in this country is at an all-time low. In 2013, Bristol University waved goodbye to the final handful of students on its undergraduate botany course, the last of its kind in Britain.
The disappearance of botany from UK universities – a remarkable landmark, surely, which seems to have passed unnoticed – is symbolic of a shift in focus from taxonomy and classification to genetics and molecular biology. It is now possible to complete a plant science course in Britain without once identifying a British wildflower. The withdrawal of our final botany degree epitomises the fact that the need to identify British plants is no longer deemed important or relevant in a society rapidly losing interest in the plant kingdom.
Casting this dispiriting thought aside, I fetched my stove and some food from the car, passing the oystercatcher now stood on a gravestone in the old cemetery. I climbed one of the dunes and gasped at the view: this second beach, called Tràigh Hòrnais, swung round like a boomerang, nestled between the dunes and the sea. The high-tide line was marked by a dark band of seaweed: kelps sprawled helplessly, fronds like ganglia; a loose strand of thongweed had draped itself over a hunk of driftwood. It was a perfect spot.
I found a sheltered hollow in the marram, set my stove up and began cooking my dinner. Closing my eyes, I listened to the rhythmic, metronomic swash and backwash of the sea and the cry of the gulls. It was by far the wildest, most tranquil place I had been so far and I loved it. Checking my phone, I had one final text: