Challenge on Nature Photography Part 5

The interconnectedness of the natural world is one of the things that makes it so appealing to Naturalists down the ages, I for example, like butterflies, and since they have to feed on something, my interest in plants has grown, and since Orchids are impressive plants with weird names, and often, even weirder Biology, I’m interested in them.



Common Spotted Orchids in abundance in West Somerset



I’ve always thought that butterfly-watching can come across as a bit strange, but perhaps orchid-hunting is even more so, in this bizarre hobby, you enter a clandestine world of ‘top secret’ locations, ‘gen’, hybrids, homozygous recessives and ‘vars’, and in many cases, drive across the country to see a plant that won’t run away, and will no doubt be in exactly the same place next year. Yet its magic, the magic of the hunt for the new, rare plants, and the many strange places that they grow never fades, I’m hooked, and so, for the fifth part of my excruciatingly slow ‘Challenge on Nature Photography’, it’s time for these charismatic plants to take the stage!

Early Purple Orchids forming a dense clump through
vegetative reproduction.

First up, is the Early Purple Orchid, it’s a bit of a generalist, growing in woodlands across the UK,(often, but not always under Hazel), but also chalky grassland, and like many orchids, it exhibits a fair bit of variation in colour, from pure white, to quite a deep purple-pink. It’s fairly common on ‘the patch’ in Somerset, and, as its name suggests, flowers fairly early in the year (April-May).



A statuesque Common
Twayblade.

Another common species, is the aptly named Common Twayblade, (it’s common, and the tway-blade refers to its two opposing leaves from which the flower spike grows), a subtle beast which eluded me during my early days of Orchid-hunting, but once seen once, popped up pretty much everywhere, from my local Railway embankment, to a flower-rich local Common, to 1800m up a French mountainside.

So far, not so weird, the Bird’s Nest Orchid however, is a much more mysterious creature, lacking chlorophyll with which to carry out photosynthesis, it’s a rather insipid brown-yellow plant, and a saprophyte - totally dependent on a fungal ‘partner’ (perhaps not the best term, the fungus gets totally ripped off), from which it obtains the nutrients needed for growth. The fungus itself is then dependent on a tree (often Beech, sometimes others, such as Hazel) with which it swaps nutrients for carbohydrates. I had always suspected that this strange plant was lurking somewhere in the old beech woods near my home, and was delighted to find several hiding in plain sight in a search this spring.


3 Bird's Nest Orchids lurking on the patch.

At the other end of the specialisation spectrum, are the Dactylorhiza species, classic ‘spikes’ in a range of loud pink colours they often grow in large numbers in unimproved grassland of one sort or another, in my part of the world, Heath Spotted, Common Spotted, and Southern Marsh Orchids are the common species.



An impressive display of Heath Spotted Orchids

 

I could go on, with the stunning Bee Orchid, and the endless quirks and variations its self- pollination throws up, the Ghost Orchid, and its mysterious flowering every decade or so, or the Lady’s Slipper and the cloak and dagger intrigue that surrounds its last redoubt oop north, but there are 56 species of Orchid native to the UK (including one extinction, and another recent colonisation), as well as 8 others of dubious status, so I can’t really cover them all here without writing a book (there are several excellent ones out there, Harrap’s ‘Orchids of Britain and Ireland’, and locally, Chris Gladman’s Orchids of Somerset), I also haven’t seen very many of them, further turning such an endeavour into a dull, photo-less desert of a blog post. In short though, there’s a lot to be said for these stunning plants, they’re not just frivolous natural quirks, and their parasitic relationships, mysterious patterns, pollination, and indeed rarity, can tell us a lot about evolution, genetics, and habitat and climate change in the UK. If you fancy learning more about them, the books I’ve mentioned are a great starting point, and the Natural History Museum’s Orchid Observers project is a great way to get involved in their conservation and study….

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/take-part/citizen-science/orchid-observers.html



A Bee Orchid looming majestically
in Large Blue country at Collard
Hill