‘The orchids have been called the Royal Family among flowering plants: a happy comparison, though hardly flattering to human royalty, if one considers some of the tropical orchids, with their debauched, pendulous lips and unhealthy mottled complexions. Nor, for that matter, on strictly physiognomic grounds, is it particularly flattering to the orchids themselves.’
Jocelyn Brooke, The Wild Orchids of Britain (1950)
Hampshire and Conwy
July 2013
That week in Hampshire I saw my first Musk Orchids of the summer. With the success of my trip to Scotland edging me closer to forty species for the year, I had returned, once again, to the chalk. My drive south had brought me into the thick of the heat wave: England was sweltering.
I had received emails from a couple of locals in Hampshire telling me of Musk Orchids in flower at Noar Hill. I had seen them there several years previously: my mother and I had visited one sunny July evening at the start of the summer holiday and discovered swarms of them.
I had been orchid-hunting alone for far too long, so I rang up my friend Sam and invited him along. Sam is a keen naturalist and wildlife photographer and probably the closest I’ve come to finding a botanical friend. He had just returned from his first year studying in Abu Dhabi and was full of stories as we crossed the border into Hampshire.
Noar Hill is a Hampshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve near Selborne. It is the site of ancient chalk workings, abandoned in Medieval times and left to wander into the welcoming arms of nature. The chalk pits form sheltered bowls on the hilltop that are filled with plants and insects. Ancient deciduous woodland borders the summit, encouraging a mosaic of habitats. The reserve boasts thirty-five butterfly species, including the Duke of Burgundy and brown hairstreak, and eleven different orchids.
We arrived at Noar Hill at five o’clock. It was still extremely hot and we were both sweating by the time we reached the top of the hill. Against the clear blue sky, the shimmering haze blurred the chalky earthworks into an optical illusion. The grassland was awash with colour: yellow lady’s bedstraw, the purples of tufted vetch and knapweed, and white ox-eye daisies standing tall in the grass.
It took a couple of minutes to reach the edge of the Musk Orchid colony. Estimated to be 10,000 strong, this is one of the largest orchid populations in the country. So I didn’t find the first one: I found the first twenty. Musk Orchids are small lollypops with delicate yellow-green bell-like flowers, each ending in three little prongs. There’s something fairy-like about them. Instead of musk, they actually emit a sweet scent that has been likened to honey, although it was very faint on this hot afternoon.
Musk Orchid is exclusive to well-drained, short grassland on limestone soils and has a preference for chalk. It is confined to the south of the British Isles and absent from lots of seemingly suitable habitat. Unlikely to be stumbled upon, this very local species requires pre-planning.
The colony at Noar Hill has built up quickly, far faster than most orchids. They are pollinated by small flies and beetles, but they also use vegetative propagation as a way of reproducing. This means that the root system produces extra tubers up to twenty centimetres away from the parent plant which then grow their own flowering spikes. Over time, the direct connection between plants is severed, forming individual genetic replicas. The result: a vast clone army of Musk Orchids.
Once again, it was John Ray who came up with the first published record of Musk Orchids in Britain in 1663. He found ‘Orchis pusilla odorata… in the chalk pit close at Cherry Hinton’. Its Latin name, Herminium monorchis, is thought to derive from Hermes, the messenger of the gods. While Hermes is known as a trickster in some myths, the Musk is an honest, by-the-books orchid that diligently provides its pollinators with the nectar it promises. Alternatively, its name could come from the Greek for ‘buttress’ which would supposedly describe the single pillar-like tuber found in this genus. However, Musk Orchid has a spherical tuber – monorchis means ‘one testicle’.
We wandered between battalions of the clone army on Noar Hill, stopping for twenty minutes at a time to take photos in companionable silence. There were more Pyramidal Orchids here than I had ever seen before, standing out like bright pink lychees among the dry grass. And with a lot of variation: some were so pale they were almost white and had a wavy, nearly solid lip. Others were vivid cerise and deeply lobed, and had pronounced ridges at the opening of the spur. These are thought to guide insects into the flower so that they are in the correct position for pollination, and can access the sugary sap inside the spur. Once the mechanism has been triggered, a small spring-like structure called the viscidium attaches itself to the proboscis of the visiting moth or butterfly, so that it can be transported to another flower.
It was a shame Sam hadn’t been around this summer as it was far more fun being with someone else. He was interested in everything: orchids, butterflies, birds. He was the one friend who never thought to make fun of my interests, perhaps because he shared so many of them.
While inspecting some of the weirder Pyramidal Orchids, we were interrupted by a small, bumbling man who introduced himself as James. He said he’d been watching us and wondering what we were doing. After we’d talked for a few minutes, his eyes suddenly lit up and he asked us whether we also liked butterflies. The answer, of course, was yes from both of us.
James tapped his nose, winked and asked whether we would like to see a Duke of Burgundy. Sam and I looked hesitantly at each other. I’m often approached by naturalists in the field, characters of all sorts, from quiet and cautious through to bouncy and exuberant. Whichever category they fall into, they are invariably delighted to meet a fellow enthusiast and keen to share what they have found. The Duke of Burgundy is found on Noar Hill, but it was far too late in the year for this little orange-speckled butterfly. I didn’t have the heart to tell James this, though, as he was clearly extremely excited by it. Putting any concerns aside, we followed him over to the top of a bank about ten metres away where he stopped, put his fingers to his lips and stood stock still. We waited, not entirely sure what to expect.
‘There’s one!’ he declared, pointing to a large meadow brown struggling to escape from a prison of long grass. Sam threw me a questioning look, eyes narrowed. ‘Look, there’s another,’ cried James. This time it was a ringlet. Neither Sam nor I could bring ourselves to tell James that these butterflies weren’t the rare Duke, merely common everyday species that can be found across the country.
After a further five minutes, during which James politely enquired as to why ‘two lads like us weren’t down the pub’, he bid us farewell. On our way back to the car, we passed an information board highlighting species to look out for and I saw at once why James had been confused. The images were beyond identifiable: there was a solid pink triangle on a green stick labelled ‘Pyramidal Orchid’ and a brown splodge with a few orange dots labelled ‘Duke of Burgundy’. No wonder James had been misled.
As I’ve mentioned, for a long time, I had wished for a friend who shared my interest and enthusiasm for botany. It had always seemed like a long shot, particularly in the twenty-first century. Botany is not considered cool and to admit you like it is to surrender to much mocking.
Earlier in the year, I had been given instructions via email to find the Fen Orchids at Kenfig by Suzie Lane. We had struck up a friendship, messaging back and forth ever since, discussing orchid sites and which species we wanted to see next. She was twenty-two and I quickly learned that her interest in wildlife was broad. She was an ornithologist at heart, but had recently discovered orchids. We talked for several weeks. Towards the end of July, I needed her help again, so invited her to accompany me in search of Dark Red Helleborines in north Wales.
I pulled into the car park at Chester station half an hour early and sat there feeling unexpectedly nervous. I tried reading but found that I couldn’t concentrate. What if we didn’t get on in real life? I’d tried not to build this up in my head as a big deal but I inevitably had; and I didn’t want to mess this up. I checked the time: still twenty-five minutes to wait. What if she arrived early? I scanned the crowd waiting outside the station entrance.
Twenty agonising minutes later, I got out of the car and walked over to the entrance to wait. I checked my phone: no messages. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and there she was. She was tall with wavy auburn hair and a large camera bag slung over her shoulder. We exchanged awkward greetings and began walking back to my car. She had a Mancunian accent and I was immediately very aware of how posh I must sound to her.
Five minutes into our journey, any initial tension had passed. It turned out we had been to many of the same places and before long we were sharing our strangest orchid-hunting experiences. It was interesting to hear about her search for Creeping Lady’s-tresses in Cumbria and Fen Orchids in Wales. She was annoyed that she had arrived too early to see the Fens in full flower. We talked non-stop and were soon driving through Llandudno, with the Great Orme towering above us.
The Great Orme is a large limestone headland protruding into the Irish Sea. Its name derives from the Old Norse word for sea serpent. The steep cliffs and abandoned Bronze Age copper mines provide suitable habitat for a rich flora that includes numerous rare plants. The surface of the peninsula is well known for its limestone pavements, a favourite habitat for the Dark Red Helleborine.
We drove up the one-way road that undulated around the headland. Cable cars slid silently overhead. Suzie had been in charge of obtaining instructions for the location of the Dark Red Helleborines and I laughed as she read them out: ‘Pass the limestone pavement, park in a layby one hundred metres on and begin looking for a lone tree by the side of the road.’ It was all so familiar: the directions of a botanist.
The Dark Red Helleborine is a member of the genus Epipactis and is the first of what orchid hunters like to call ‘true helleborines’. Epipactis was first used as a plant name by Theophrastus (c. 370–285 BC) and derives from the Greek word epipaktoun, meaning ‘close together’, supposedly referring to the placement of the sepals. The number of species in Europe is debated, with estimates ranging from a conservative fifteen to a seemingly excessive fifty-four. Here in Britain, there are eight species, all of which flower in the latter half of the summer. The Cephalanthera helleborines, which flower earlier in the year, are closely related but are thought to have diverged from the ‘true helleborines’ earlier in evolutionary time.
Epipactis flowers all have a similar structure. The three sepals and two petals are very similar but the lip is divided into two sections. The inner section forms a small bowl-like structure called the hypochile, which is where the nectar is secreted. The outer section, or epichile, is a triangular landing pad with its tip bent underneath the flower. They are delicately constructed flowers, and in the Dark Red Helleborine they are stained blood red.
Having found the layby in the instructions, we parked and walked down the narrow road. A wall of pale stone rose clifflike on our left; to our right, there was a steep drop down to the sea. In the distance we could see the Welsh coast as it curved back round to the west and over to Anglesey, which was lit up in the sun.
We caught sight of a silver-studded blue bouncing around in the grass in a sheltered spot by the road. We followed it, willing it to land. It eventually did, gripping a blade of grass tightly as it shifted in the slight breeze. Casting our eyes around, we realised this was a small colony and counted at least forty individuals, mostly females, but a few fresh, shiny males. They were the subspecies caernensis, Suzie told me, which is restricted to the Orme. I had seen the other, commoner type of this small butterfly in the New Forest.
Suzie suddenly yelped: she had found the Dark Red Helleborines growing by the side of the road at the base of the cliff. There weren’t many, ten perhaps, and I was alarmed to find that most of them had almost finished flowering. Maybe their proximity to the coast had accelerated their flowering season? We were also towards the southern extent of their range in the UK, so they were likely to flower earlier.
Dark Red Helleborines are tall and thin. Two ranks of dusky-green oval leaves give rise to a long stem adorned with striking wine-red flowers. The pollinia and anthers are a bright, contrasting yellow. We took it in turns to photograph the one good plant, already competing with one another for the best photos, while the other acted as traffic warden.
Records for Dark Red Helleborines date back to 1650 when William How noted it in his Phytologia Britannica on behalf of a Mr Heaton. John Ray documented it in 1670, growing in Yorkshire ‘near Malham, four miles from Settle, in great plenty’. The grykes in the exposed limestone pavement above Malham Cove are a perfect helleborine hideout.
Walking back, Suzie noticed another helleborine growing on a small ledge about three metres above the ground. Frustratingly, it was in perfect flower, far better than the plants by the roadside. I was impressed with this royal-red orchid. It gave off the air of a supercar: shiny, polished and desirable. It taunted us from above.
Back in the car, Suzie was telling me something about a trip to Kent, but I wasn’t listening. My brain was working quickly, trying to figure out a way to get at the Dark Red Helleborine on the ledge. I’d had an idea, but wasn’t sure if it would work. Dropping the handbrake, I let the car roll slowly down the hill. As we drew level with the orchid, I pulled the car to the edge of the road so that it was as close as possible to the cliff-face.
After assuring Suzie she wouldn’t go through the roof, I instructed her to climb onto the top of the car. I stood on the other side of the road, keeping an eye out for traffic. She placed one foot on the roof and the metal sank menacingly. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. But when she lifted her foot, the roof sprang back into shape. She cast a nervous glance in my direction and I encouraged her with a nod. She inched forward. Once in the right position, she straightened up until the orchid was at eye level. It was, we agreed, the nicest Dark Red Helleborine either of us had ever seen.
We got some interesting looks from passers-by: some were amused, others amazed, and all of them were probably wondering what on earth we were doing. Sometimes it takes a little improvisation to get the perfect view of a Dark Red Helleborine.
This had brought me to forty species for the summer so we celebrated with ice creams and a round of mini-golf on top of the Orme. It had been a great day. As we moved round the pitch-and-putt, we began discussing future orchid trips we could do together. After all, I still had twelve species to find. Just to be talking plans made me happy. For me, this new friendship represented the coming together of the two parts of my life: the strange orchid-obsessed me and the me who actually had some normal friends. Could it really be that I was no longer on my own?
Small, drab and unassuming aren’t necessarily adjectives you would expect to see applied to members of the orchid family. Many British orchids are considered beautiful, and as a consequence have suffered at the hands of collectors. The tiny green Bog Orchid, though, while rare, has generally evaded the attention of the plant lover. Being the smallest British orchid, rarely growing taller than seven or eight centimetres, it is extremely difficult to find. Add to this the fact that it grows well out of reach in swamps and bogs, and you can begin to understand why. Jocelyn Brooke, writing in The Wild Orchids of Britain, remarks that its habitat ‘is a further discouragement to any but the enthusiast; and even the enthusiast may hesitate to wade through acres of peat-bog unless he has good reason to suppose that Malaxis is to be found in the locality – which, too often, is not the case’.
Malaxis is the former Latin name for the Bog Orchid, which is now known as Hammarbya paludosa. The genus Hammarbya pays tribute to the small summer residence owned by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. He would visit the Hammarby estate when he wanted to escape from life in Uppsala. The specific epithet paludosa simply means ‘of marshes’.
A few days after my trip to north Wales, I drove down to the New Forest to try and achieve what I had failed to accomplish with my father all those years ago: find a Bog Orchid. It was mid-afternoon and the warm summer sun had lit up the plains and heathland. New Forest ponies crowded the roadside, slowing the traffic down to a crawl. There were lots of cyclists on the roads, enjoying the weather, and plenty of ice cream vans plying their trade.
I parked the car in a sandy car park just west of Brockenhurst and slipped into my wellies. The bog here was enormous but certainly looked promising: large blankets of Sphagnum moss provided the perfect habitat for the Bog Orchid. In 1898, A. D. Webster wrote of the Bog Orchid ‘growing on trembling sods of bog-moss, or sphagnum, [where] it almost dares one to venture with impunity’.
I started at the edge of the bog where the golden star-like flowers of bog asphodel sprung from tufts of bog-myrtle. I found white-beak sedge and dangly bog sedge and cross-leaved heath with pink inflorescences like bunches of grapes. By this point, I was seriously regretting wearing my wellies. The heat was rapidly becoming unbearable so I began to edge my way further into the bog, carefully stepping on the grassy islands to avoid causing too much damage to this fragile ecosystem. Pastel-blue keeled skimmer dragonflies buzzed in and out of view, occasionally embracing in vicious aerial battles above me while the daintier large red damselflies quietly went about their business at ground level.
Everywhere I looked, there were red-green sundews: their leaves are hairy ping-pong paddles covered in glistening globules of a sweet, sticky liquid. Looking closer, I could see insects and small spiders trapped in the gluey dew, some struggling against it but only succeeding in aggravating their predicament.
Peat bogs are highly acidic environments. This doesn’t mean they are dangerous to us, but to a plant they present some significant challenges. The water contains very little oxygen, and few nutrients. To survive in these tough conditions, sundews have devised a rather gruesome yet crafty coping mechanism: they eat flies. Or rather, they suffocate and consume any insect they can get their leaves on. These hapless critters in front of me were about to be rolled up, asphyxiated and digested by a substance secreted by the plant. What’s left would be absorbed through the sundew’s leaves.
Across the bog, the birch trees shimmered as a light breeze passed through. Below them, grassy hummocks and bilberry bushes crowded around the perimeter of the marshy areas. I picked a few berries for sustenance.
The smell of a peat bog is unmistakeable: rich, earthy and damp. Close up, it becomes a whole other world. Bending down, I saw sedges, spike-rushes and grey-green, flowerless heathers. Sphagnum moss formed rafts of auburn, lime and russet that bubbled and gurgled. The stagnant surface of the brown water was covered in an oily iridescence, caused by iron salts in the peat.
An hour passed and I was still searching. Other than flea sedge, whose mature fruits jump when touched, I hadn’t found a thing. Certainly no Bog Orchids. I decided to give up and try somewhere else, so packed up my camera and drove north to Lyndhurst and the bog I had visited with my father.
I was beginning to have doubts about how long it might take me to find this diminutive species. It seemed like an impossible task: find a tiny green plant in a haystack of a bog.
I was greeted by more keeled skimmers, and ducked as one flew straight at my face. It looped round and settled on a sedge leaf, and sat there cleaning its eyes and face, its head swivelling mechanically. Each wing was a perfect, colourless stained-glass window: a net of black veins forming triangles, hexagons and ellipses. It held them horizontally like a biplane; panes of membrane scattering the light. As I approached, it leapt up with an audible flick and was gone. Dragonflies are so difficult to admire up close.
Out on the water, the flowers of insectivorous lesser bladderwort stuck up like periscopes. Instead of trapping prey with sticky glands like the sundew, the bladderwort uses small vacuum-creating pouches that float on the water. When an insect passes the entrance, it triggers a mechanism that breaks the vacuum, causing it to be sucked into the plant, where it is dissolved and consumed.
After fifteen minutes of searching, I found my first Bog Orchid perched on a cushion of Sphagnum. It’s a strange plant: tiny and green with a single pair of cupped leaves not unlike those of the Fen Orchid. The inflorescence is a narrow cylinder of flowers that resemble miniature cartoon space rockets. Unusually, they look like they’re upside down: the lip is at the top of the flower rather than at the bottom as in all the other species. This appears odd at first, but actually these flowers are the right way up, and all the other species’ flowers are, in fact, upside down. As the orchid flower bud develops, the lip is at the top, as in the Bog Orchid. In most cases, though, the flower stem twists through 180 degrees so that the lip ends up at the bottom when it opens. For a while it was thought that the Bog Orchid didn’t undergo this ‘floral resupination’ but it does, only it doesn’t stop where it is meant to and continues full circle, twisting through 360 degrees.
Before getting any closer to Hammarbya, it is wise to carefully inspect the surrounding area to avoid treading on others. In doing so, I quickly spotted two more close by. They were ridiculously small: one was only about a finger nail’s length and bore a single flower.
I carefully got down on my knees and smiled as a Bog Orchid came into focus. There was a constant sucking, bubbling and gurgling from the bog as the smell of wet peat filled my nostrils. I was slowly sinking into the mud. Every now and then a raft spider would scuttle across my calf, making me jump.
Despite its diminutive nature and drab colour, I quite liked the Bog Orchid. Perhaps it was the satisfaction of finding this unpretentious plant after searching for so long. In England, there are a few scattered records, mainly centred in the New Forest and Cumbria. There are some outposts in Wales, but other than that you have to go to Scotland to have any chance of finding them. Given its size, habitat and camouflaged colouration, it could easily be under-recorded.
To walkers along the road, I must have looked somewhat eccentric, creeping about in the bog, but they ignored my Gerald Durrell-like figure, in a very English way. Better to just accept and move on than to ask questions. It occurred to me that I was becoming progressively weirder and wilder as the summer went on.