Paul Lawston's Wild Space

This week has marked the start of what I like to think of as orchid season. I don’t know what it is about orchids that I love so much – there’s something infinitely exotic and beautiful about this diverse group of flowering plants. They’re ephemeral and can be hard to find, and yet once you know “Your patch” then you’ll be rewarded year after year by the reappearance of these wonderful flowers. Some of them are among the UK’s rarest flowering plants, and there are some species that grow in just one small space in this country. Orchids have always held a special fascination for me – when I was growing up in the Avon Valley a favourite walking spot was Martin Down, an almost fabled nature reserve on the borders of Hampshire and Wiltshire. There are numerous species that grow here, including rare Burnt Orchids (Or Burnt-Tip when I was a child), Greater Butterfly Orchid, Bee Orchid and lots more besides. The names are part of the joy of finding them – the Bee Orchid really does resemble

Hopefully you’re aware that this week is Mental Health Awareness Week. Mental well-being is something that nobody would have been able to ignore over the past year, with the pandemic and the lockdowns implemented to deal with it causing immeasurable damage to people’s mental health. Throughout the past year the stream of bad news stories has been horrendous, with the endless speculation about where it might all end and how best to deal with it. Your previously fairly sane-seeming friends may have metamorphosed into froth-mouthed conspiracy theory-spouting maniacs or started to refuse to go outside in anything other than a Hazmat suit. And that’s before you get on to the unimaginable horror and tragedy of the actual pandemic itself. To put it mildly, it’s all been a bit too much. There has been a fair bit of optimism from time-to-time – as I type this my immune system is busily producing the antibodies and t-cells for fighting Covid-19, after receiving my first vaccination against it.

Sometimes it works out that you go off in search of one thing, fail to find it and in the process discover something unexpectedly wonderful. One of the hardest lessons to learn in exploring the natural world is to open yourself up to make the most of whatever comes your way, whether it’s finding the beauty in something as familiar as a robin or a daisy or seeing something amazing through pure chance. Our last nature excursion beyond the M25 took us out in to the wilds of east Kent. Kent is blessed with quite a lot of really extraordinary wildlife, from the apocalyptic scenery of Dungeness to the steep scarp slopes of the North Downs, it should probably re-brand itself as “The Wildlife Garden of England.” (The Kent Tourist Board is welcome to use that – the first one’s free) Among all its varied landscapes and wildlife though, for me Kent is synonymous with rare orchids, and this is what we'd gone out to look for. We had driven down to Denge Wood just outside Canterbury to meet