The Joy of Looking for Orchids

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 a bee, and the Greater Butterfly is like a pale, ghostly moth. Its not hard to see the shapes in them and, in some cases, it aids the orchid in attracting a specific pollinator to spread its pollen around.

Man orchid at Box Hill last year

I’ll be honest, when it comes to my actual scientific expertise, botany isn’t top of the list for me having specialised in Zoology at university. I’m learning more and more though and I’m adamant that botany is the hardest of all the observational sciences. Becoming interested in botany, by its very process, encourages you to get closer to nature – you have to look carefully at the arrangement of petals, the pattern of bracts or tiny details of how the sepals curve backwards to make that species-level identification. The amateur (And professional) obsessives of our flora are known as “Botanisers,” and they’re one of the most generous groups online when it comes to sharing their passion.

To illustrate just how carefully you have to look I visited a couple of reserves this week looking for these wonderful flowers. My first stop was a trip to Hartslock, just outside Goring-on-Thames, one of the best places in the UK to see the very rare Monkey Orchid. I was quite surprised by how small the orchid slope at Hartslock actually is; a little patch of meadow clinging to the side of a hill overlooking the mid-waters of the Thames below. The views are brilliant, but the orchids are sensational. Monkey Orchids are surprisingly quite small flowers, but they make up for their diminutive stature by looking just like what they were named for: little tiny dancing monkeys with four gangling limbs and a tail. Spotting them is quite tricky – you have to look for their little pink tufts in amongst the lush vegetation.

Monkey Orchid at Hartslock

Dwarfing them though, and roped off for their protection, is a botanical oddity – back about 23 years ago, another orchid was found at Hartslock, the closely related Lady Orchid. The Lady Orchid is a beast of a flower, with a crown of pale, spotted ladies dressed in blousy frocks. Somehow, the single spike of Lady Orchid cross-pollinated with the Monkeys, giving rise to a swathe of huge hybrid orchids. It’s the only place in the UK where this hybrid occurs, and these orchids are spectacular. Some botanists view them as an artificial oddity, but there’s no denying that the sight of these pink-purple flower spikes dominating the hillside is rather an arresting one.

Monkey x Lady orchid hybrids - for some Botanisers, these don't count!

Inspired by success in Oxfordshire, I headed east with Rachel today to Kent in search of Lady Orchids. Bonsai Bank, deep in the woods south of Canterbury, is another of these legendary orchid sites, a semi-wooded slope dotted everywhere by the flower spikes of Lady Orchids. Unfortunately, as we pulled on to the M25 to track south of London and out into the Garden of England, I realised that I’d neglected to swap my camera from its usual little Crumpler bag and into the camera backpack in the boot. Whoops.

I often wonder if my love of photography gets in the way of me appreciating and connecting with nature. Is it better to view the natural world with my own eyes, or do I gain more and look closer through a viewfinder and macro lens? Photography, particularly macrophotography of flowers, has encouraged me to look closer at the little details, and even without a camera I can still do this. Even without the camera, Bonsai Bank is a wonderful spot, smothered in Lady Orchids, with numerous Early Purples and Common Twayblade. Here and there we also managed to spot the modest little brown flowers of Fly Orchids. Occasionally these would have sticks poked in the ground next to them – a method Botanisers use to help others spot a hard-to-find flower, and in the case of Fly Orchids, if you’ve never seen one before, this is incredibly helpful! I also found a few White Helleborines just coming in to flower here and there. On Tuesday, a friendly local had directed me towards a swathe of these subtle white flowers when I’d been in Hartslock – the power of local knowledge is indispensable for finding some of the best wildflower displays.

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Lady Orchid

All in all a productive week, and orchid season will continue with the Military Orchids coming in to bloom and the Man Orchids at Box Hill not far behind. They make Spring and Summer a time of sleuthing for wonders! If you want to get further inspired by orchids then I thoroughly recommend two excellent books on the subject – The Orchid Hunter, by Leif Bersweden, and Orchid Summer, by Jon Dunn. Both writers have a real passion for their subject which comes across in their respective books and if you read both (And you should read both) you’ll find it hard not to get swept up in “Orchid-mania.”