The ghostly flower blooms in near darkness among the rotting leaves on the forest floor. It has not so much as a speck of healthy, life-giving green. The stem is a greasy tube the colour of dead skin. The few, nodding flowers have a deathly pallor. They ‘droop and dither’ between pink and yellow. Some say they blacken at the touch. Sometimes a slug has been found on the half-eaten stem. Few of us have been lucky enough to find this strange plant in Britain. ‘The usual experience1 of ghost-hunters,’ noted one rueful searcher, ‘is that there is nothing there.’ On the rare occasion when there is, for a moment you don’t quite see it – just a pale wisp, a phantom of a flower, barely visible above the blanket of decaying leaves. Then you look closer and it snaps into focus, something pale and spidery, about three inches tall, with outsize flowers on a leafless stalk. The flowers seem diseased or dying, even when they are in full freshness and vigour. They have the beauty of a lovely corpse.
Its full name is the Ghost Orchid, Epipogium aphyllum. It has also been called the Spurred Coralroot, the Spur-lipped Coralroot, or, with less imagination, the Leafless Epipogium. It was named the Ghost not so much for its physical appearance as for its ability to blend into its background to the point of near invisibility: a ghost in camouflage. That name was coined by the botanist David McClintock after he was taken to see the plant in 1953 and could still hardly see it until his nose was inches away from the drooping flowers.
The Ghost Orchid lacks chlorophyll, the green pigment that enables plants to manufacture their food by photosynthesis. Instead it feeds insidiously on fungi locked inside its swollen, coral-like ‘root’. The science writer Richard Fortey, who lives near one of its former sites, dubbed the plant a ‘parasitic piggyback’2. The orchid captures the fungus and then proceeds to digest it, as needed. Until recently the plant was assumed to be a saprophyte, a species that feeds on decaying matter. But when its physiology was investigated there was a surprise. It is the fungus that manufactures food from decaying leaves, while the orchid has turned the tables on its erstwhile fungal ‘partner’ in a kind of biological double-cross. Rather appropriately, its favourite food is said to be the mycelium (the mass of thread-like filaments in the soil or attached to tree roots that make up the body of the fungus) of poisonous toadstools of the genus Inocybe.
The Ghost sits at one corner of a ménage à trois between orchid, fungus and the roots of a beech tree. The imprisoned fungi, which are themselves growing with the help of trees, tap the beech roots for sugar and water and offer in exchange foodstuffs such as phosphates that are essential for the growth of a healthy tree. Trees and fungi commonly work in such a partnership, but in the Ghost Orchid’s case, this partnership has morphed into slavery and then predation. Like a spider that consumes its mate, the orchid has taken full and unsentimental advantage of an evolutionary opportunity. It takes food from the fungus, and then turns the fungus into food.
So, with a belly full of macerated mushroom, the Ghost has no need of leaves. It doesn’t need proper roots, either, for its ‘coral root’ is technically an underground stem with tuberous pseudo-roots. For most of the time it gets along without flowers, either. On the rare occasions when they are produced, the flowers are as bizarre as you might expect. The Ghost’s scientific name, Epipogium, means ‘over-beard’ or ‘upside-down beard’ (aphyllum means ‘no-leaves’). The ‘beard’ in question is the main petal, shaped like Darwin’s generous face-hair, except that it sticks upwards by means of a twist in the flower’s ovary (and that’s another thing it doesn’t have: what appears to be a flower stalk is in fact the ovary, the bit that swells after flowering into a capsule for the seeds within). It is this big petal that provides the Ghost’s only definite colour, a spotty, washed-out pink. The rest of the flower, and indeed the whole plant, is cast in shades of sickly greyish-yellow.
The flowers look a little like rose-bodied spiders, perhaps dead ones, for they dangle flaccid and motionless from their hollow stem. They have a faint scent, some say of vanilla or fermenting bananas; but others have sniffed only mould and decay. Perhaps the Ghost smells of vanilla when the flowers are fresh and turns musky later on. In Britain, at least, these flowers seem to be a pointless luxury. Although they attract flies and bees in search of pollen and nectar, no ripe seed capsules have ever been found. Presumably cross-pollination seldom – if ever – takes place, simply because there are never enough flowers in bloom at any moment. Some flowers get devoured by slugs (or picked by botanists) before they get a chance to seed. So, in addition to managing without roots or leaves, and for most of the time without flowers either, it seems that the British Ghost has to manage even without fertile seed. Instead, among its swollen coral ‘root’, it produces little bulbils that push out more underground stems. These can be quite long; in the Ghost’s best-known site they seem to have burrowed right under the road. Hence, if you are ever lucky enough to find a group of Ghost flowers, they probably all belong to the same network of underground stems, and hence to the same genetic plant.
It is possible, even likely, that there are more Ghosts out there than we know of, lurking among the leaf-mould, flowering so rarely and quietly that they defy detection. But the absence of flowers, or ripe seed, brings heavy penalties. It means that the Ghost cannot colonise new sites, but can only perpetuate itself in old ones. If a disaster afflicts its home ground, it cannot return. It seems predestined to decline. And disaster has indeed overtaken many of its former sites, through gale damage, felling and replanting, the rutting and churning of heavy vehicles, and even the trampling feet of its human admirers. The number of places where the Ghost could reappear is getting smaller all the time.
The plant shown to David McClintock was the first to be found in more than twenty years. Some thought the Ghost had departed the scene and was in fact extinct, but others imagined it had merely gone to ground – quite literally so – living on out of sight, below the carpets of leaf-mulch, with worms and fungus for company. It was finally rediscovered by Rex Graham (1915– 58), an amateur botanist and dedicated Ghost-hunter, who had spent years searching for the plant in some of the shadiest woods in southern England. One July day in 1953 he was tramping the ground in a wood near Henley – a place hardly different from hundreds of other beechwoods in the Chilterns – and rested on a tree stump to light his pipe. And just then, over the bowl of the pipe, he spotted something: a pale flower poking up like a periscope from the ocean of brown leaves. ‘To be honest,’3 he told David McClintock, ‘I was ready to give up, and the feeling when I saw it was of relief more than anything. It was [only] the following day that I felt euphoria.’ It was just luck, he told another friend. A subsequent, very thorough search of the wood revealed no fewer than twenty-five flowering Ghosts belonging to what were thought to be twenty-three individual plants. Never before, or since, have so many been found all at once. Moreover, at least one vigorous plant continued to produce flowers almost annually, always in late summer, for more than thirty years, right up to 1986.
In most of its other sites, the Ghost has been more fickle. It comes and goes, spookily, and no one knows where or when it will appear next, or indeed if it will appear at all. It was found for the first time in 1854 on the bank of Sapey Brook near Tedstone Delamere on the then-border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Its discoverer dug it up for her garden, where the plant promptly expired (and I hope the Ghost’s ghost haunted her garden and mildewed her roses). It was not seen again until 1876, and then in a different place: Ringwood Chase, sometimes called Bringewood Chase, in Shropshire, where, once again, it appeared and then disappeared. A third appearance – one is tempted to call it an apparition – was near Ross-on-Wye in 1910, and it was the last for a long while.
Then, in the 1920s, word got around that the Ghost had begun to haunt a new area, the beechwoods near Henley. It was first found by Eileen Holly, a local schoolgirl, and had evidently flowered there for a year or two, for a botanist who managed to track her down noticed the sickly bloom among flowers in a vase on her windowsill. More years went by, until 1931 when Vera Paul found another Ghost, also in the Henley area and not far from her cottage. This one was unusually tall – a foot high, peering from the hollow of a rotting stump. It was photographed in situ, perhaps for the first time; and it was that hand-coloured image by Robert Atkinson that was reproduced in the orchid-hunter’s Bible, Wild Orchids of Britain by V. S. Summerhayes. All previous Ghost portraits were drawings and paintings made from picked or pressed plants. Vera Paul’s plant flowered, on and off, over the next thirty years.
A local resident, Joanna Cary, recalled years later how, as a child, she had been frightened by the sight of ‘funny men in gaiters’4 rummaging around in the wood by her cottage. She thought they might have been flashers, or criminals intent on burying something. But it was only Victor Summerhayes and his band of Ghost-hunters, out on their annual, always unsuccessful attempt to track down another specimen.
And that was the tally of Ghosts, until the moment when Rex Graham lit his pipe. Many people visited his site between 1953 and 1986. On one remarkable occasion a plant was found growing out of a mattress abandoned in a ditch by the road. I have been to the spot several times, but always found a very Ghost-free wood. The site was easy enough to locate, by the side of a wooded lane where it was bordered by a steep bank. On my first visit, someone had banged a post into the ground to mark the spot and, to make doubly sure, had placed a brick next to it. Fortunately my trips there were never wasted, for this used to be a marvellous place for woodland flowers, including Violet, Narrow-lipped and Broad-leaved Helleborine, and the plant that most nearly resembles a Ghost, the Yellow Bird’s-nest, another species that lacks any green coloration. But my Ghost-hunts were always failures. I would lie among the damp leaves, flashing a torch this way and that – for I’d been told the Ghost shines white, when struck by a beam of light. One time I found a little tepee made of twigs and suspected there had once been a Ghost inside that makeshift cage. Another time I found a dead, brown stem close to that wooden Ghost post, possibly the husk of a previous Ghost, but just as likely the remains of a Yellow Bird’s-nest. I wonder now why I did not excavate the earth around the stem as far as the root, which might have confirmed its identity. That is what the prolific botanical diarist Eleanor Vachell did in 1926, after being shown the exact spot where the schoolgirl had picked her Ghost flower. She and a companion had ‘crept stealthily’5 to the place and, ‘kneeling down carefully, with [our] fingers removed a little soil, exposing the stem of the orchid, to which were attached tiny tuberous rootlets’. They replaced the earth reverently, covering the tiny hole with ‘twigs and leaf-mould, and fled home triumphant’.
The last time I visited that wood I was shocked at the change. Until 1987 the Ghosts had bloomed beneath smooth, soaring beech trunks whose branches met eighty feet above your head, like the nave of a cathedral. Light filtered down in greenish shafts, dappling and pooling on the floor far below. But those majestic trees were hit hard by the great gale of October 1987. Down they crashed, pulling up great saucers of chalk and clay in their mighty roots. And, after that, the ground was further rutted and furrowed and scraped by work teams and timber lorries. Sunlight poured down through great ragged holes in the canopy. Thickets of bramble sprang up and the special, sepulchral atmosphere of the place was lost. It now looked like what it was: a wood shattered by wind, ground up by heavy vehicles and, lately, chewed up by increasing numbers of deer. Few orchids get the chance to flower now, much less set seed. Before they can, the deer bite their heads off.
The year 1987 was, in fact, the last British record of the Ghost for more than twenty years – or, at least, the last authenticated sighting. The previous year nearly a thousand botanical pilgrims had gone there to see just a single plant: a small Ghost with two flowers, one of the most-photographed flowers ever. What had been a fairly well-kept secret had been blown apart by a birders’ hotline offering exact particulars. Since then, it has been a case of finders-keepers. If Ghosts still linger among the archipelago of beechwoods in the southern Chilterns, no one is saying so.
I wanted very badly to see a Ghost. But if the plant had indeed gone for ever, it meant I could at least cross it off my list of plants-to-see. For I was planning a project I’d been waiting half a lifetime to fulfil: a grand tour of Britain to see every native wild plant, including all those that had eluded me over forty years of plant-hunting. For the first time I had the leisure and enough money to spend much of the summer chasing wild flowers. We have a lot of wild flowers – around 1,500 species, if you include ferns and their allies (the exact figure depends on how you define ‘native’ and how you define ‘wild’). There are five native flowers for every breeding bird, twenty for every species of butterfly and thirty for every kind of wild mammal. It is often said that our island flora is impoverished compared with that of our continental neighbours, but even so not many people have seen all our plants. You would need a lifetime to find them all. We have, for instance, around fifty orchids, one hundred ferns and fern-allies, fifty sedges, twenty-four rushes, twenty speedwells, twenty-two pondweeds, nineteen bedstraws, even a dozen buttercups. There is a lot of plant diversity packed into Britain.
Why did I want to see them all? Mainly because I love wild plants and wanted to meet them all in the flesh, in the beauty of their natural settings. The journey would, I realised, be a long one, but it would offer adventure and companionship in corners of Britain that still, miraculously, retain their wild beauty and natural diversity. It would, I reckoned, be possible to do it in a year, if I restricted myself to plants I hadn’t yet seen. There was, of course, a train-spotting element to this, a nerdish desire for completion. And a very good – in fact overwhelming – chance that I would fail. If so, I knew who to blame. It was all the fault of a dead Devon vicar called William Keble Martin.