British Orchids

Once upon a time I thought that orchids were tender tropical plants with exotic flowers; the sort of thing that you could see in hothouses or in that beautiful collection in Jersey. Then a few years ago, much to my surprise, I found the permanent meadowland around my home in Sliabh Mannan full of strange plants.

I tentatively identified the more common of these (left), from a guide book, as the common spotted orchid (dactylorhiza fuchsii), though to my way of thinking that was a serious misnomer since I had never spotted it before.  It  turned out that the name signified the presence of dark spots on the leaves and spotted patterns on the mauve flowers.







Considerably less common was a much darker purple flower (right) that I thought was probably the early marsh orchid (dactylorhiza incarnata).  I claim no great conviction behind these identifications, so if you know better please feel free to let me know. There is a variety known as heath spotted and another called northern marsh that look superficially very similar.

The new flowers were attended by a locally new species of butterfly, the common blue, as reported in an earlier post (28 October 2013) of this blog.

For the next few years a few stunted specimens appeared erratically. This month however the meadows are once again full of these beautiful wild flowers. I suspect the mild winter has encouraged them, as it has so many tender plants.

Remarkably the magnolia in my garden flowered this year for the first time since I planted it, although I bought it years ago as a sapling already in flower.

Common Species

Of all the many nature photographs that I have taken in more than forty years of wandering about on Sliabh Mannan, mostly in company with a dog, this is one of my favourites.  The remarkable thing was that both of the featured species are officially called 'common', whilst for my part I had never seen either before.  I had to turn to the well-thumbed pages of one of my reference books in order to establish that I had now observed the common blue butterfly (polyommatus icarus) feeding from a flower of the common spotted orchid (dactylorhiza fuchsii).

The year was 2011 and the month was July. As I recall it had not been much of a summer for people, but for some reason there were wild orchids all over the moor and in every field. I have a friend who knows about orchids, but unfortunately I did not happen to meet him during this extraordinary period. Had I chanced upon him I dare say that he could have explained to me what was happening. I was just left to wonder at it.

I suppose that a botanist would find nothing particularly strange in a flower species suddenly appearing in an area where it has been largely unknown before. For me the movement of flora is even more mysterious than the movement of fauna, and I don't understand as much about that as I should like to do. The one thing that I can certainly say is that these unusual common species brightened a climatically fairly dull season.