Nature has never conceived a more bewitching – or bawdy – treasure than the dazzling orchid family. Right now every walk’s a hunt.
TO GET ANY closer I would need a machete. Barbed vines tangle into a thick barricade, behind which I can glimpse a single orchid. Magenta flowers cluster vividly to a foot-high stalk which changes colour from green to purple as it rises from the forest floor. Beyond, set even deeper in the lush foliage, I spot a second, paler spike of blooms. But I’m not walking in the jungles of Ecuador or Borneo. I’m in an ancient woodland in Northamptonshire, looking at early-purple orchids.
Each stem of orchis mascula can grow up to 50cm tall and carry up to 50 flowers, usually pink-purple, but sometimes delicate blush, or even white. The fragrance of its fresh blooms has been likened to lily-of-the-valley with a hint of blackcurrant; once fertilised it’s more the stench of a tom cat. Its foliage too is striking, a rosette of blade-shaped leaves with dark splotches which legend says are drops of Christ’s blood from the crucifixion, where the plant grew beneath the cross.
Down in the dirt, things get bawdy. Each earlypurple orchid has a pair of tubers which look like testicles: the genus name orchis comes from the Ancient Greek word and in Middle English these species were known as bollockworts. Dried and ground to a flour called salep, then mixed with milk, honey and spices, the tubers made a popular drink in the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, they were thought effective in witches’ love potions and as an aphrodisiac. In fact, the two tubers look quite different. One is plump, ready to feed next year’s growth; the other is shrivelled, having nourished this year’s spurt. Botanist Robert Turner wrote in 1664 the effect each had was also quite different: ‘The full roots do powerfully provoke to Venery, but the lank ones are said to mortisie Lust.’
The early-purple is just one species in a vast, eccentric family. Its roots twine back maybe 100 million years and there are more than 28,000 kinds of orchidaceae globally, and counting. They bloom on every continent bar Antarctica, growing in the earth (terrestrial), in trees (epiphytic), on rocks (lithophytic) and even underground. Their flowers can be as tiny as a pen-tip or have petals three feet long. They can look like monkey faces, flying ducks, green squid or white egrets. They can smell of chocolate, citrus, vanilla (the spice pods come from orchids) or reek like pond scum, rancid brie or ‘a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun’.
In Britain, 52 species (roughly; estimates vary) decorat
