Where the wild orchids sing

The enchantingly beautiful native orchid is, tragically, one of Britain’s most endangered wildflowers, but it’s still possible to see them if you look in the right places

- Ben Jacob

FROG, bird’s-nest, bee, fly, monkey, late spider, lizard—if you think these are ingredients for a potent Hallowe’en brew, think again: welcome to Britain’s fascinating array of wild orchids. Orchids are the most diverse, most highly evolved flowering plants on the planet. With more than 30,000 species (compared with 6,399 mammalian ones), the vast majority are native to tropical zones. It was these that wealthy Victorians feverishly imported at great cost from the jungles of Asia and the Americas. Ever since, tropical orchids have overshadowed Britain’s native flowers, to the extent that many people today simply do not realise that we play host to more than 50 species.

The first of Britain’s native-orchid flowers appear in early spring. On a few cliff tops along England’s south coast, stumpy plants with small lime-green leaves open fuzzy brown flowers surrounded by a corona of five light-green ‘legs’. Centuries ago, herbalists thought these blooms looked sufficiently like little fat-bellied spiders to call the plant the early spider orchid and the name has stuck. To me, they look more like little paper models of strange lime-and-chocolate lollipops quivering in the breeze. In fact, their complex combination of shape, colour and texture—as well as a scent mixed from more than 100 different chemicals—has nothing to do with spiders (or lollipops). Rather, it evolved to perfectly mimic those of a female solitary bee, which tricks newly emerged male bees into attempting to mate with the flower. In this process (known as ‘pseudocopulation’), the bee pollinates the plant.