Four, three, two, one. The last four wild flowers. Where are they? What are they?
4
Thistle Broomrape
Orobanche reticulata
The Thistle Broomrape is a parasite of thistles with white flowers arranged in a spike on a brownish, leafless stem; searched for among thistles and tall grass at Ripon Loop by the River Ure in North Yorkshire.
3
Blue Heath
Phyllodoce coerulea
No. 3 is Blue Heath, an alpine relative of heather with single crimson, bell-shaped flowers held on curving stalks; searched for among rocks on the Sow of Atholl, Perthshire, with the help of Martin Robinson and Iain MacDonald.
2
Ribbon-leaved Water-plantain
Alisma gramineum
And No. 2 is Ribbon-leaved Water-plantain, which has clusters of pale lilac flowers and long, narrow leaves growing in shallow (or sometimes deep) water; searched for in Westwood Great Pool, Droitwich, Worcestershire, with the help of Nick Button, Brett Westwood and Harry Green.
The Quest had failed first in the mist and rain on Skye and then again on that fatal day on Coll when I decided not to risk my shaking limbs and chattering teeth for the sake of the Slender Naiad. Right from the start, I knew I was unlikely to succeed in my mad attempt to see all the British plants, unless someone in the meantime had found a Ghost Orchid and – even less likely – had told me all about it, exactly where it was and in good time, before a slug ate it.
But the Ghost Orchid is not the only impossible plant. One of the year’s low points was an afternoon by the River Ure, near Ripon in North Yorkshire, inspecting thistles. There were plenty of thistles: the bank and adjacent meadow were choked with them, massed spiny stands pricked with purple cossack heads that would later fill the air with thistledown. But although it was clearly a good year for thistles, it had not favoured Plant 4, Thistle Broomrape, a white-flowered thistle-parasite about a foot high and shaped like a poker. Though widespread in Western Europe, both in the lowlands and in the mountains, in Britain the plant has always been confined to Yorkshire and in consequence is sometimes called the Yorkshire Broomrape – especially in Yorkshire, one imagines. Even here it is found only in half a dozen places, mainly in limestone grassland close to rivers. Like other broomrapes, it flowers well in some years, but not in others. In Britain, out at the limit of its range, it seems to be a very choosy plant.
I did my best. I did the research. I visited a place that in years gone by had produced scores of broomrapes. I searched. And searched some more, and found nothing. Shortly afterwards a team from the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust also had a day there broomrape-searching, and by the evening they had found just three plants, consisting of six stems. The previous year had been nearly as bad and, mark you, this was its very best site and was managed as a nature reserve. Was it something to do with the recent string of mild, rainy winters or, perhaps, two wet summers on the trot? We can only speculate, but in the meantime, what was to have been Plant 4 had been, to borrow a bird-twitching phrase, a total dip-out, another ‘nemesis-plant’.
A few days later I was on the domed top of the Sow of Atholl overlooking Drummochter Pass, famous as a site – once the only site – for Blue Heath, an alpine plant better known by its scientific name, Phyllodoce (a name weirdly borrowed from a sea-nymph). The ‘blue’ is a translation of the Latin caerulea, but the bell-shaped flower is not blue, but crimson. Some say its leaves can take on a bluish sheen in certain lights, though more usually they have a coppery tint. Martin Robinson, the local botanical recorder, had warned me that we might be too early to see the flowers, but he hoped to show me the developing leaves at least (on which I earnestly hoped to find the odd bud). And Iain MacDonald from Scottish Natural Heritage had brought with him an aerial photograph of the hillside with the exact positions of Phyllodoce marked on it. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘to like late snow-patches, in mossy furrows among the high rocks that later turn into springs.’
We couldn’t miss it, could we? However, we noticed, as we clambered up through short, deer-browsed heather, that a lot of rocks had fallen lately in the area where Phyllodoce grows. Apart from knocking over the plants, unstable masses of rock are not sensible places to roam, and especially not when they end in a cliff. All the same we gave that steep hillside a fairly thorough going-over, each of us adopting a different beat and combing the ground like police searching for clues. The trouble is, said Martin, that when Blue Heath is not in flower, the leaves look very similar to common crowberry, which grows all over the hill. Iain thought he remembered that the leaves of Blue Heath are slightly flatter and with slightly rough edges, but you would probably need to compare the two side by side to be sure. Well, we searched and searched and didn’t find a single Phyllodoce, in flower or not. Martin looked worried, as well as frustrated. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’ve had a grand day on the hill, and it’s only a plant.’ Specifically it was Plant 3. And it was failure number four.
I spent another day with Brett Westwood, the Worcestershire naturalist Harry Green and Nick Button from Natural England hunting for Ribbon-leaved Water-plantain in a shallow lake near Droitwich. It is the only known site for this mysterious, seldom-seen plant, apart from a couple of deep dykes in the Fens, where it only flowers underwater. It is a private lake, but the kind owners not only gave us open access to it, they even lent us their boat. We were looking for a plant with a spray of fingernail-sized, pale-lilac flowers, each the shape of the ace of clubs, flowering in a welly’s depth of water above floating, ribbon-like leaves. First, we decided to search the lake from the boat, jumping out to paddle in whatever shallow bay looked vaguely suitable. Failing to find any water-plantains, we then paced the shore, again jumping in wherever there were gaps in the dense fringe of sedge and reedmace. Nothing. Not so much as a bud or leaf. And what was more, not much suitable habitat, either. The dots on our map, which marked the places our plant had been seen in previous years, were mostly now dense sedgebeds. The plant may return from dormant seed persisting in the sediment, given a little help from mankind. But if there had been a single damn Ribbon-leaved Water-plantain flowering in that lake, I like to think we would have found it. It seemed as though Plant 2 had not deigned to appear this year. And so Alisma gramineum turned out to be something of a ghost too, another species sitting it out until its environment improves.
That left the Ghost Orchid, our most baffling and, it seems fair to say, rarest wild flower. I had searched for it before, in the deep, shaded woods near Henley. I had been to places where it had flowered. I once missed it by a matter of weeks, perhaps days. But so far the Ghost had eluded me, as it had eluded so many others – and, indeed, everybody since 1986. Could it still be out there, somewhere, in some darkly wooded corner where few botanists ever tread? It seemed to me more than likely but, as Simon Leach said of the Pedunculate Sea-purslane, and as I now understood, you can’t search for plants like this and expect to find them. You have to stumble across them by accident.
1
Ghost Orchid
Epipogium aphyllum
The rarity of rarities may be still out there somewhere, flowering fitfully or just sleeping, its bloated rootstock ticking over
Searched for near Henley – ever hoping, never succeeding
The Return of the Ghost
In 2005 the Ghost Orchid was declared extinct in Britain. The last official sighting had been on the bank of the wooded lane where it had flowered more or less annually since Rex Graham had rediscovered the thing, over the bowl of his pipe, back in 1953. But its wood had been badly damaged by the 1987 great gale and subsequent clearing-up operations. No Ghost-hunter has seen it there since, though plenty have looked. There were no certain sightings anywhere else, either, only rumours. In 2009 Plantlife, the conservation charity, decided to make this apparent extinction the subject of a ‘declaration’. The loss of the Ghost is a warning to us all, they declared. It represents a challenge: we must do all we can to prevent the extinction of any other wild plant or, for that matter, any wild species. They called it the Ghost Orchid Declaration. The Ghost had become a kind of plant martyr. Goodbye, old Ghost. We won’t forget you.
The ink was still drying on the Declaration when word on the street came that it might be still with us after all. Those in the know whispered that it had reappeared, not in its old haunts, but somewhere close to the Welsh border. It was true. By an extraordinary coincidence, a single tiny plant had been spotted just two weeks before Plantlife’s press release. The finder’s name was Mark Jannink. A man of rare dedication, his single-minded aim had been to search each and every one of the orchid’s old haunts in the west until he refound it. The year – 2009 – Jannink had reasoned, was an unusually promising one for Ghosts. The coldest winter for many years had not been followed by a ‘barbecue summer’, as the weathermen had predicted. Instead it had been exceptionally cool and wet. The only sustained period of warm sunshine arrived late, in September. Ghosts, it is assumed, prefer cold winters followed by wet springs to encourage the growth of fungi in their roots, and then a warm spell in late summer to tempt the plant to put up a shoot. But even Jannink was ready to give up when at last, right at the end of the season, on 20th September, he stumbled across a tiny, barely visible flower. It was a Ghost. At that moment Epipogium aphyllum was no longer extinct. ‘Hello, you,’ he is supposed to have whispered. ‘So there you are.’
It was growing under a line of oaks at the edge of a conifer plantation, enclosed in a hollow little larger than a footprint. The merest streak of a plant, almost the ghost of a Ghost, it was invisible except to the keenest eye. In a photo taken by a third party, Mark and a friend are pointing at the plant. I have the picture on my screen but, stare as I might, enlarge as I might, I still can’t make out the Ghost. Mark likened the flower, not then fully expanded, to a snowflake. A friend shown it a few days later compared the apparition to a ‘single leafless white violet’. This Ghost, the first that had been seen in Britain for twenty-two years, didn’t look happy. It was growing at an oblique angle to the bank, so that its single open flower almost touched the ground. Some bug had gouged a hole into the spur where the flower stores its nectar. A few days later a hungry slug found the plant and selected the flower’s main petal, known as the lip, for a snack. Having finished that, it went on to chew away part of the stem.
Only an inner core of active Ghost-hunters witnessed the resurrection. Two days after its discovery, five of them were standing there in a semicircle at seven-thirty in the morning. They stared. ‘Some swore1 under their breath, others giggled with poorly suppressed excitement.’ The now-open flower revealed pink spotting on its damaged, beard-like lip, the only dab of strong colour on its straw-coloured translucency. Over the next few days more witnesses watched it fade and turn brown. By the time of Mark’s last visit the plant had become a corpse, bitten in two by that hungry slug. The remains were reverently collected and donated to the National Museum Wales. There, in the herbarium, the last British Ghost resides, a brown stem with a little mutilated flower: hardly more than an inch of former plant life, held down by strips of tape.
The Ghost’s reappearance was announced to the world at the BSBI’s annual exhibition in November 2009. Plantlife sportingly welcomed the ‘wonderful news’. ‘Applying the extinct label2 to a plant is always difficult,’ explained its conservation officer, Trevor Dines. ‘Plants can turn up from seed or following better surveys… But just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer,’ he warned, ‘[so] one Ghost Orchid doesn’t constitute a viable, long-term population of a species.’ The Ghost may not be extinct any more, but it is still ‘critically endangered’. In retrospect, the surprise was not that the Ghost is still with us, but that anyone could have spotted this insubstantial wisp, this near shadow, in the shroud of earth and decaying leaves of its last resting place.
I met Mark on a fern-hunt in North Wales. Quiet, modest, hairless and fit, he was wearing a broad-brimmed hat. When not botanising, he builds performance-standard motorbikes. That day he was by far the most adventurous of us, scrambling up on to high ledges with confidence and an evident lack of fear. He had been given plenty of climbing practice by his next, post-Ghost botanical project: the Killarney Fern. Like the Ghost, this delicate, beautiful fern inhabits a world of secrets. It was collected to near extinction during the craze for ferns in the nineteenth century, and survives mainly in places the collectors had missed or were afraid to venture: holes and caverns in shaded gorges, rock underhangs, dark, splashy recesses tucked behind waterfalls. Mark showed me the dossier he kept of Killarney Fern localities. He had mapped each one in fine Wainwright-like detail, with notes on how to scale steep, slippery slopes, with or without a rope, and photographs of the various crevices and holes in which the fern seems to melt. Mark has probably seen more Killarney Ferns in Britain and Ireland than anyone alive – perhaps more than anyone who has ever lived. He kept a similar dossier for the Ghost Orchid, not of actual plants but of places where it had appeared, or might appear, but only in the one case where it actually did appear.
Of course I wanted to know more about the Ghost quest. What did it feel like to track it down? ‘Well,’ remembered Mark, ‘for a start, I didn’t say, “So, there you are.” I was on my own and I don’t talk to myself.’ This misreporting had evidently irked him. What he might have thought, but certainly didn’t say out loud, was: ‘So now I can go home.’ Like Rex Graham half a century earlier, he had felt more relieved than triumphant. And although the publicity was inevitable, he hadn’t welcomed it. Mark was bothered that people would pester him for details, ask him to show them the plant, or at least tell them where it was. And word did get round in orchid circles, and more people came to see it than the place could support, without damage. Although the tiny plant was respected, the bare earth around it became trampled and punctured with camera tripods. And then brambles closed in, making further searches difficult and future ghostings unlikely. It had been a very ordinary spot, nothing special, just an earth bank under some trees. If the Ghost could appear there, it could appear anywhere. And probably will. Come late summer, the band of Ghost-hunters will be out in the woods again, searching hopefully. But Mark Jannink will not be among them; having found the Ghost, he had reached the end of that particular journey and moved on.
Was his Ghost really the only one? Such is the secrecy surrounding it that others could have been found, but not reported. The Ghost lurks on the frontier between rumour and fact. One Ghost-hunter, Sean Cole, referred to a number of unauthenticated sightings. The suggestive broken stem, for example, with a fat slug sitting where the flower might have been, which may or may not have been a Ghost. My own contribution to Ghost Orchid legend is a story told to me by an orchid-hunter from Connecticut. She had visited England about fifteen years back, she thought, and had been told of a Ghost in a wood somewhere, near a place beginning with ‘C’ (the Chilterns?), and not all that far from London. She went there and found a single plant with three flowers. It was inside a stockade… ‘Whoa,’ I interrupted, ‘a stockade?’ ‘Yes, a stockade made of wood. There was a low door in which you had to kinda wriggle through. There was a man outside reading a book. He said it was okay to go in.’ ‘So he was guarding the orchid?’ ‘Kinda, I guess. He said, “Go right in.” There were other orchids in there too – helleborines.’
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. She did not strike me as a fantasist, and she was quite knowledgeable about orchids, especially from North America. She travelled distances to see rare ones. But I couldn’t believe the stockade. A wooden rampart with a man outside, like the guard at Buckingham Palace, would not have remained unreported by our army of orchidophiles. Perhaps her memory was at fault and it had been thirty years ago rather than fifteen, in which case she might have been referring to the well-known Rex Graham site. Or perhaps she mistook the flower for something else – perhaps a Bird’s-nest Orchid. But that is how these stories get around: misty, intangible, even unlikely, but surprisingly persistent.
I was hoping, rather than expecting, that the Ghost would reappear just in time for my quest. It would have made a good ending: the best kept till last – my last flower. I emailed my contact in the closed circle of Ghost-hunters. Anywhere, any time, I’d travel. I would swear never to tell a soul. They could blindfold me, if they liked. But it seems that the Ghost had never reappeared since that day in late September when Mark Jannink stumbled upon it. It may not be extinct, quite, but there does seem to be something wrong with British Ghosts. In Europe, in the Black Forest, say, or dark, mossy pinewoods in Sweden, the flowers appear fairly regularly, in some years more than others, but often in good numbers. Come warm, damp weather in late summer, up they nose through the decaying needles or leaves and put forth their spotty pink-and-yellow flowers into the open air. It may be that England is no longer Ghost-friendly; too winter-warm, perhaps, or without the right kind of pollinator. Something – who knows? Perhaps that steady parade of Ghosts in one Chiltern wood from the 1950s to the 1980s was not normality, but a freak; an unusually well-fed and active colony, eventually killed off by a very un-English hurricane. At the time of writing, no more Ghosts have turned up, and so the completion of my quest had been doomed from the start. Finding all the flowers is currently impossible: for me, for everyone, unless or until the Ghost decides to flower again. It haunts our inevitable failure. It sticks out its spotty tongue to empty space.
My health recovered slowly. With no alcohol and relatively little sugar to bother it, my liver healed itself, as livers do. There were no more internal screams for help, only a mild nudge, an alimentary hint now and then, usually after an occasional, illicit cocktail or sneaked bar of chocolate. Nurse Tracy pronounced herself pleased with my progress. As did the optician, who announced that my sight was back to normal after a couple of months of doubt. It would be wrong to claim I felt reborn. What I felt now was mortal. I realised there would probably be no more quests. Nature, in future, would be strictly for fun.
Of course I expected to suffer, and in a funny way I welcomed the midges, the trudges through wind and rain, the fretful, sometimes fruitless searches, and even, perversely, the outright failures. For they created a running narrative that took shape by the chance of events as if I were a fictional character in a book. I was prepared to take things as they came. Maybe it was bad luck to choose a year when the summer weather was, at best, changeable. And, of course, I could not have predicted the sudden, dramatic decline in my health, or the fatal illness of my mother. Maybe the pressures of near-continuous travel affected me more than I had bargained for. Maybe it wasn’t sensible to have taken on so much botany in a single season. But challenges are, by their nature, not sensible or within one’s comfort zone; they need to be difficult and uncomfortable or else they are not challenging. What I did not fully realise when I set out was the unexpected reward that comes from searching for wild flowers. Flower-finding is not just a treasure hunt. Walking with your head down, searching the ground, feeling close to nature, takes you away from a world of trouble and cares. For the time being, it is just you and the flower, locked in a kind of contest. It is strangely soothing, even restorative. It makes life that bit more intense; more than most days you fairly leap out of bed. In Keble Martin’s words, botanising takes us to the peaceful, beautiful places of the earth. ‘It is good fun and healthy’. It has only just occurred to me but offhand I can’t think of a single field botanist who committed suicide.
And so I failed, but failure has its compensations too, in that the journey goes on. Maybe I will see all the wild flowers before I die, or there again maybe not. But in future I will go at my own pace. I will take my time. If I do ever see a Ghost, it will be a new experience, not a codicil to a failed quest. That bite no longer itches. Like the retired King Pellinore in the King Arthur stories, I am done questing.
Any prolonged encounter with wild flowers – or indeed wild anything – necessarily also becomes an investigation into the state of our natural environment. There are, as Jane Goodall would say, reasons for hope, but not all is rosy in this wild garden. Flowers and ferns are natural survivors. Our native species have been with us for the whole of human existence, and have adapted to the endless pressures and strains we place on them. But today they face unheard-of adversity. First there is the battle for physical space. Already pushed to the margins, many of our once familiar, once near-ubiquitous wild flowers are being squeezed into ever-tighter pockets of unused (or under-used) land. Nature reserves once seemed the answer – but even when plants are shut up behind a fence on protected land, it is impossible to isolate them from external influences, not least the slow, insidious build-up of nitrates and phosphates that promote aggressive brambles, nettles and hogweeds at the expense of more delicate wild flowers. Nor are they spared the consequences of climate change, with less frost and snow in winter and more rain in the summer, and perhaps more frequent floods and gales, too. I fear for the mountain flora in particular. I wonder how much longer Norwegian Mugwort will last, up there on its exposed ridge; or Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade, in its eternal game of hide-and-seek with a larger relative eager to hybridise with it. We are living through the greatest fundamental change that wild plants will have experienced since the Ice Age. I hope their genes can cope with it. We all need hope in this business.
My trail of flowers was also a reminder that there are still wonderful places left in Britain, many of them defined by the presence of some elusive plant. I am happy to have stood on the frost-blasted ridge that is the sole domain of Diapensia, and to have walked the secret paths of the New Forest to glimpse lush, lipstick-red gladioli peeping from the bracken. I saw plants that I only knew from drawings and photographs, and usually found them lovely beyond expectation – for there are things even the best images cannot capture: the natural setting, the wind in your face, the sheer exhilaration of being there. I have travelled many of the wilder places of Europe, but still find something special about wild Britain, homely and rooted as it is, with its intimate scale, its detail, its mixture of ancient and modern, its sleepy corners and heart-tearing beauty. It is all the more special because it is ours, and who cares if this or that rarity is as common as chickweed on the other side of the Channel? We want them here because here is where they belong, and where they have been for thousands of years.
Above all, the days spent in the company of like-minded people were a reminder that, for the naturalist, there is no pleasure like a species shared. My quest would have been so much less successful, and far less fun, without the many kind, generous friends who were willing to act as guides and to share their knowledge and enthusiasm. When I think of those dedicated people, the backbone and heartbeat of British botany, I think of Mike Porter and his daily post of sedges, gazing into the latest ziplock bag with a look of rapture (‘I think I’ll need to count the stomata on that one’); of David Pearman getting up two, three hours early to do his botanical emails; of Tim Rich, high up on some cliff measuring whitebeam leaves; of Ian Strachan tramping the lonely hills of Westerness, Britain’s last botanical terra incognita. Each of them has had their own quest, whether to write the definitive flora of their county, or to author-edit a national plant atlas, or to delve more deeply into the arcane world of micro-species, faithfully recording the small but significant particulars that define a species or a place. Sharing a passion is the ultimate joy. To others, the world of field botany might seem stuffy and preoccupied with unconsidered trifles; it may baffle and frustrate, with its funny names and technical jargon. It may at times seem irrelevant and even slightly bonkers. But to engage with wild flowers we need only look, watch and enjoy. If it interests us, and makes us feel good at the same time, I think the case for botany is already made. Flowers are precious not only in themselves, in their beauty and fascination, but because they are good for us too, and we need to look after them better, in our own interest as well as theirs. If you have enjoyed my botanical wanderings as a reader I hope that you too will find your own journey of flowers, perhaps a lifelong one. A journey that, in Keble Martin’s words, allows plants to speak to us, and for us to find in them a new appreciation of life.