Until now, I had never set out, systematically, to try and find every plant in the flora. Mostly, flowers, trees and ferns turned up in the course of walks, camping trips, ecological surveys and the like. The one family where I did once make an effort to locate and photograph every British species was the Orchidaceae, the wild orchids, in my gap year between school and university. I failed miserably, finding only two-thirds of them by the season’s end. Even now, there were two missing British orchids on my list, the Irish Lady’s-tresses and, of course, the Ghost.
The first county whose plants I got to know fairly well was Devon: a big county with a big flora and a fine range of plant habitats, ranging from the bogs and tors on Dartmoor to the limestone headlands of Tor Bay and the wilderness of sand at Braunton Burrows – not to mention the island of Lundy and its unique wild ‘cabbage’ – the subject of my first published paper. During my three years at Exeter University I was able to find most of Devon’s special plants, including the magnificent display of white rockroses at Berry Head, the intense blue stars of Blue Gromwell where the cliff had slumped into the sea near Axmouth, and the little, spring-flowering Sand-crocus on the golf links at Dawlish Warren – where, after having taken its picture, I was kicked out by a grumpy official.
Keble Martin assured his readers that botanists ‘take no risks’. We do, though. Sometimes we have to. When you have driven a hundred miles, and trudged another ten over moor and hill to find a cliff with your flower halfway up it, you are definitely going to climb that cliff. I’ve fallen off a few times. I’m probably lucky to be alive, after attempting to get within touching distance of Tufted Saxifrage. What seemed like a reasonable toehold gave way, and down I went, with flailing limbs in a spray of gravel, turf and rock. I was alone, and miles away from any help. Perhaps it was the malice of the flower’s guardian spirit, which had mistaken my purpose and thought I was about to pick her precious bloom. I fell off Ben Lawers, too, but that is a more comfortable mountain, with soft turf to ease the return of the plummeting botanist. Welsh Mudwort played a nasty trick on me once, when, eagerly peering into pools for its spiky rosette and dim little submerged flowers, I failed to notice that the rising tide was flooding the river, and that the mudwort and I were about to be stranded on a fast-diminishing patch of terra firma. Remarkably few botanists seem to have died for their hobby; at least not since 1861, when the plant collector William Williams was found at the bottom of a cliff with a tuft of Alpine Woodsia in the clutch of his stiffened fingers. For most of us, natural caution usually wins.
‘We commend botanising1 as a means of healthy recreation for young and old,’ continued Keble in his best, sermonising style; one that should ‘last to the end of our pilgrimage’. His own pilgrimage lasted nine decades, active to the end. Field botanists, I’ve noticed, often reach a great age; in fact the average age of members of botanical societies tends to be in the fifties or sixties. We hear a lot about the distance that has grown up between people and nature, and how this severance has had malign effects on our well-being, leading to obesity, listlessness and morbid self-absorption. Without nature, we lose our sense of rootedness. Wild flowers offer an antidote to computer-age neurosis. You don’t need to be a botanist to feel uplifted by the mist of bluebells tracing the woodland floor; or a meadow full of buttercups, bright as sunshine; or even the stellar sprinkle of daisies on the lawn. Birdwatching can be exciting, but plants offer something else, a feeling that is hard to describe: a kind of inner calm, a feeling of oneness with nature. It is a good feeling and it makes us happy.
Yet, sadly, field botany is not as popular as it was a century ago. Television has sidelined flowers in favour of animals and birds that move about and do things (flowers do things too, but less obviously, and often too slowly for the camera to catch). To newspaper editors, the most thoroughly urban of human stereotypes, wild flowers are usually relegated to the gardening section. Those who write nature notes are warned to stick to the birds and bees. Even the academic world has spurned us, for not a single British university now offers an undergraduate course in botany (they still do in Ireland). By contrast, in the age Keble Martin was born into, ‘plants were just about the most interesting things on the planet’, as Richard Mabey puts it in his revivalist book, The Cabaret of Plants. Readers then were entranced by the wonderful new plants brought to Kew and Edinburgh from all over the world – huge, carnivorous plants that could swallow a mouse, flowers you could smell a mile off, water lilies whose enormous leaves have inspired architects. Darwin spent a lot of time with plants, studying how they reverse the tables by catching and devouring animals and insects, or fooling them into doing their bidding as pollinators. Plants made people think. They tweaked our imaginations and inspired wonder and respect. Whatever happened to all that? We still love trees – witness the growth of charities such as the Woodland Trust – but we tend to think of them not as wild plants but, in the memorable words of the woodland scholar and author Oliver Rackham, as ‘gateposts with leaves’2. We stick them into the ground and harvest them later on, like slow-growing corn. When did we lose our respect for wild plants?
Twitching birds has grown up in my lifetime into a popular hobby with its own established hotlines and culture. It even has its own language – ‘crippler’, ‘megatick’, ‘dip-out’. Plant twitching, is, by contrast, socially invisible. I have met people, even quite young people, who tick plants. However, it is not Keble Martin that they tick, but Clive Stace, the author of the present standard British flora. Stace-tickers (a tricky phrase to say out loud) make less distinction than I do between which flowers are native and which aren’t. Thanks to plants that ‘escape’ into the wild, Stace has nearly three times as many species to tick as Keble Martin, and no one will ever complete that particular quest, for garden escapes are endless, a continually unfurling list of exotica.
Plant-tickers are often people who tick everything – ‘pan-listers’ as they are known – naturalists who try to identify every animal, vegetable or bug. The champion pan-lister is Jonty Denton, who has seen and identified an incredible 12,000+ species of wildlife in Britain, including 2,000 wild flowers. They post their tallies and new species on websites, along with their favourite ‘grippers’ and ‘cripplers’, or Best Find Ever, or bogey-species, which are the ones that ought to be findable but just cannot be located. They also have ‘grails’, the species that, above all others, they long to see. The Ghost Orchid tends to make its way onto such lists. It is both a grail and a bogey-species, and also the ultimate crippler.
I had already enjoyed a couple of years in which I had whittled down my own missing plants from more than a hundred to the Last Fifty. These trips were entirely pleasurable. I cleared up the remaining plants of Dorset and Cornwall with the help of my old botany-buddy, David Pearman. We tracked down Greek Spurrey in a National Trust car park close to a parked lorry, and Lesser Tree-mallow along a suburban street by a Tesco superstore (but it has been known there long before the superstore, or even the street). I raced through Sussex, pinning down Red Star-thistle in a farmyard behind a historic tiled barn, Wall Germander close to a signpost at the Seven Sisters, and Stinking Hawksbeard inside a charged fence on which I casually electrocuted myself. I caught up with the two missing plants from my home county, Wiltshire: Tuberous Thistle on the army ranges on Salisbury Plain, and Loddon Pondweed in the middle of the river near Bradford-on-Avon. Another natural-history friend, Brett Westwood, showed me Grey Hair-grass at a place with the wonderful name of Burlish Top. Phil Pullen took me to see Field Eryngo in a convincingly native site on a hillside overlooking the grey sprawl of a Plymouth housing estate.
And so, by degrees, I reached the Last Fifty: to me, the most elusive plants in Britain. I assumed I would find the missing plants in their approximate order of flowering, but in practice it didn’t work out like that. In fact, I sought them in the following order:
50 Radnor Lily or Early Star-of-Bethlehem, Gagea bohemica
49 Early Sand-grass, Mibora minima
48 Unspotted or Suffolk Lungwort, Pulmonaria obscura
47 Slender Cotton-grass, Eriophorum gracile
46 Interrupted Brome, Bromus interruptus
45 Fen Woodrush, Luzula pallescens (or L. pallidula)
44 Crested Cow-wheat, Melampyrum cristatum
43 Few-flowered Fumitory, Fumaria vaillantii
42 Spiked Rampion, Phyteuma spicatum
41 Childing Pink, Petrorhagia nantuelii
40 Least Whitebeam, Sorbus minima
39 Ley’s Whitebeam, Sorbus leyana
38 Fen Ragwort, Senecio paludosus
37 Early Marsh-orchid, cream-coloured form, Dactylorhiza incarnata subspecies ochroleuca
36 Proliferous Pink, Petrorhagia prolifera
35 Purple-stem Cat’s-tail, Phleum phleoides
34 Yarrow or Purple Broomrape, Orobanche purpurea
33 Wild Gladiolus, Gladiolus illyricus
32 Holy-grass Anthoxanthum nitens (or Hierochloe odorata)
31 Crested Buckler-fern, Dryopteris cristata
30 Holly-leaved Naiad, Najas marina
29 Elongated Sedge, Carex elongata
28 Leafless Hawk’s-beard, Crepis praemorsa
27 Thread Rush, Juncus filiformis
26 Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade, Circaea alpina
25 Creeping Spearwort, Ranunculus reptans
24 Alpine Catchfly, Silene suecica (or Lychnis alpina)
23 Whorled Solomon’s-seal, Polygonatum verticillatum
22 Diapensia, Diapensia lapponica
21 Iceland Purslane, Koenigia islandica
20 Alpine Rock-cress, Arabis alpina
19 Norwegian Mugwort, Artemisia norvegica
18 Purple Oxytropis, Oxytropis halleri
17 Estuarine Sedge, Carex recta
16 Upright or Tintern Spurge, Euphorbia serrulata (or E. stricta)
15 Tasteless Water-pepper, Persicaria mitis (or Polygonum mite)
14 Copse Bindweed, Fallopia dumetorum
13 Strapwort, Corrigiola litoralis
12 Triangular Club-rush, Schoenoplectus triqueter (or Scirpus triqueter)
11 Irish Lady’s-tresses, Spiranthes romanzoffiana
10 Slender Naiad, Najas flexilis
9 Pipewort, Eriocaulon aquaticum
8 Slender-leaved Pondweed, Potamogeton filiformis
7 Hartwort, Tordylium maximum
6 Sickle-leaved Hare’s-ear, Bupleurum falcatum
5 Pedunculate Sea-purslane, Atriplex (Halimione) pedunculata
4 Thistle or Yorkshire Broomrape, Orobanche reticulata
3 Blue Heath, Phyllodoce caerulea
2 Ribbon-leaved Water-plantain, Alisma gramineum
1 Ghost Orchid, Epipogium aphyllum
What a set of names they are. Even though some botanists prefer the scientific names, as they have to do in journals, nearly all native plants have been given common names. Some of them – like buttercup, dandelion and pimpernel – date back to the Middle Ages. Shakespeare knew the cowslip, primrose, pansy and columbine. In more recent times, common names have become standardised, but some people still use folk names, such as my Wiltshire speciality, the fritillary, which is also known by many people as crowcups or snake’s-heads (or, according to the poet and plant-lover Geoffrey Grigson, as the Mourning Bells of Sodom). But rare and little-known flowers do not attract folk names and so tend to have just one name, the one allocated to them by botanical authors – which, in many cases, is a straight translation of the scientific name. All the same, there is a kind of unintentional poetry in the names of my Last Fifty. Some names seem to hint at a secret nook where a rarity survives, such as Tintern Spurge or Radnor Lily. Others suggest that our plant might be more at home elsewhere, such as the Iceland Purslane or the Norwegian Mugwort. Yet others indicate a resemblance to some unlikely object: a pipe, or the ear of a hare, or the tail of a cat. Some are just odd: what, for instance, is a naiad? What kind of plant looks like a hawk’s-beard, assuming a hawk even has a beard? A few seem to grasp at negatives: a plant that is ‘tasteless’, or distinguished by its lack of spots. One is simply ‘Diapensia’ – like rhododendron, a scientific name that has wandered into the common language and so has become English.
The obscurity of these plants is, to me, part of their allure. Some are little-known beauties. The first on my list, the Radnor Lily, has a glorious golden flower that blooms in the depths of winter. Holy-grass is a plant you can sniff out of the landscape by its powerful scent. Our one and only wild gladiolus is a luscious gem that has somehow managed to remain all but unknown. There was a time when the whereabouts of such plants was known only to intimates. It was no accident that an earlier incarnation of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (the BSBI, lately renamed the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) was the Botanical Exchange Club: members exchanged the localities of rare plants just as they exchanged plant material. Tracking down a rare and elusive flower was part of the fun. I own a folder of ‘Botanical Directions’, sealed with a leather strap, made by an eager flower-finder half a century ago: a collection of letters, postcards and little maps with crosses to mark the spot. You could find a plant by clues in the landscape: a stand of trees, or a bend in the stream, or a curiously shaped rock. That agreeable form of botanical treasure-hunting has, alas, been consigned to history by the GPS. Hand-drawn maps have given way to twelve-figure grid references. But I have kept my own notebooks with their coloured maps of where to find Monkey Orchid or Wild Tulip: green for the woods, blue for water, and red for the bull’s-eye – the magic circle, the secret place.
The reasons for missing these particular fifty plants were various. Plant lists tend to reflect where we live, or have lived, or where we have been on a course or on holiday. I live in the south of England, and so many of my missing plants occur at the other, far end of Britain. Some of them, as I say, may be plants I have simply failed to recognise. Others are among our rarest wild flowers. I knew from the outset that I was unlikely to be able to find them all on my own, and, besides, I didn’t want to. Part of the pleasure of any quest is the chance to go botanising with old friends and also to meet new enthusiasts. The world of flower-finding is fairly small, but it is warm and welcoming. I was lucky to meet local plant recorders who were willing, even eager, to help. Companionship in the field is not only safer, but more stimulating. We talk plants and lunch in a nice pub and get to know one another, or renew an old acquaintance. The twin summits of field botany are finding a flower and making a friend.
Perhaps finding just fifty wild plants does not sound much of a challenge. After all, unlike birds, flowers can’t fly away. They stay put, rooted to the soil, right under your nose. But you do need to be able to spot your plant in the tangle of vegetation, in the glare of the sun or in deep shadow. You also need knowledge of what you are looking for and how to recognise it; and some idea of the places where such plants grow. You need to be something of an ecological detective, one who, pace Keble Martin, is prepared to take mild risks. For some places that are good for flowers are difficult of access, uncomfortable or even dangerous – quaking bogs, cliffs, cold northern lakes, tidal marshes, or simply places owned by someone who plainly hates botanists. Flower-finding is also a battle against the perennially changeable British weather. In dull light, a flower may remain tight shut. In rain, droplets condense on a chap’s specs until he can hardly see his boots, let alone some tiny sandwort. Your feet tire; so do your eyes. The trail can grow weary; you may long to give up and go home. Yes, it is possible – just – to see all the native plants. But you need to really, really want to.