My law-breaking mission to save Britain’s endangered orchids
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Version 0 of 1. A garden centre. The soft artificial light of neon bulbs. Aisles hung with gloves, plastic bottles, plant food. Houseplants perched on white tables. Maybe not a place conventionally thought to change a life, but it changed mine. Not the bottles or gloves, but one of those houseplants. There it was in a plastic pot in the company of a few others, long, dark-green, strap-like leaves fountaining around columns of big star-shaped blooms that seemed to have been fashioned out of ruby, opal, citrine. The moment I saw it everything else lost focus. Those flowers held me spellbound. The plant was an orchid, a Cymbidium originally native to parts of Asia, propagated to feed a lucrative market in tropical orchids. I didn’t know that at the time. I was nine. I had been interested in nature – birds, mammals, David Attenborough documentaries – for a long time, but that exotic bloom was a league apart. It held me entranced. My parents were kind enough to buy it for me (I think they liked it, too) and my first orchid sat on the landing, its flowers slowly dying. The challenge was to make it flower again. I saved up pocket money earned from washing my dad’s car to purchase a book called Essentials of Orchid Care (or something like that). As this was in the days before the internet, getting hold of that book required convincing my parents that we needed a return trip to the garden centre, which (oh, what a coincidence) might also afford me the opportunity to feast my eyes on other orchids. As they are keen gardeners, this was not a challenge. Alas, they did not agree that the first Cymbidium deserved a companion, but I could buy the book. Essentials of Orchid Care featured a Cymbidium. I followed the book’s advice and learned that the secret to getting Cymbidiums to flower is keeping them cool over winter. Looking back, that early encounter established a pattern: orchid magic inspires me to find out more about it. I read a book then act on what I find. So that’s what I did with the tropical species I subsequently encountered in garden centres and orchid shows. I bought a few different species and books about them, read the books, learned about their habitats, who discovered them and how endangered some of them were. The more I learned, the more fascinating they became. That’s not surprising – as a family of plants, they really are botanically different from any others. All that added to their appeal. I’m not alone in being smitten by orchids. The total value of tropical orchids to the global houseplant industry has been calculated at around £3bn a year. This demand is directly descended from the Victorian orchidelirium, that period when plant hunters scoured jungles to locate orchids, ripped them from their native habitats and transported them back to the auction houses of London to feed a feverish hunger for exotic plants. Tales of those plant hunters’ derring-do fed into the mystique of orchids and became part of their – our – history. For someone like me with a well-developed sense of wanderlust, the adventures of orchid hunters radiated their own appeal. Could I follow in their footsteps and find tropical orchids in their native habitats, not to steal them, but to photograph them? Fast-forward a couple of decades during which I visited the forests of Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Colombia and Venezuela before a series of unfortunate – or perhaps fortunate – events returned me to England. Here, quite by chance, in Devon, I encountered a native British orchid. It had three little pink flags arrayed a bit like a jester’s hat around a fuzzy brown bumblebee-sized oval. The markings on that brown velveteen oval reinforced its comic appearance – pale yellow and curving upwards, they looked like a grin. An odd, long, thin, lime-green protuberance overhung the oval. From it hung two small sunny baubles. I was astounded. I recognised the species. I was astounded because I recognised it. It was a wild British orchid. I had never seen one before. For the entire time orchids had guided my life, I had relegated British species to a second or even third league. I had regarded them as common. Lesser. Uninteresting. I adored the gorgeous pouched flowers of Paphiopedilums from Thailand and the clouds of slender five-starred Brassias from northern South America. That day, I realised my mistake. Britain’s orchids were just as exquisite, bizarre and complex as any tropical species, and they didn’t need a plane trip and jetlag to reach. Inevitably that encounter led to research. From accounts written by botanists in the time of Elizabeth I, I learned wild orchids had once bloomed across swathes of the land. I also discovered that, since the turn of the 19th century, those species had suffered significant population decline, in some cases 90% (or more) of their historical numbers. In at least one instance so far (a little white orchid called Summer Lady’s-tresses) that loss has led to extinction. Learning this, I felt foolish. I had spent years travelling the globe to see orchids in threatened habitats. Yet for all that time I had been woefully ignorant of the very real danger of extinction roaming Britain’s temperate green fields and rolling hills. I needed to atone for my ignorance. The fate of a colony of near-threatened orchids on a roadside verge (they were Autumn Lady’s-tresses, cousins of the extinct Summer Lady’s-tresses) with wonderful spirals of honey-scented flowers showed me how. Soon after I discovered that roadside orchid colony, they were destroyed by construction vehicles turning neighbouring fields into a housing development. Surely, I thought, in this country with its much-vaunted eco-credentials and environmental protection laws, those rare orchids were legally protected. As it turned out, they were not. That was when orchids taught me that the laws designed to protect our nature do not extend to protecting them from approved construction projects. This was one of the reasons why Britain’s orchids were dying out: up and down the country they (and dozens of other species) and the habitats they need to flourish were being destroyed with impunity by landowners and developers. That became the inspiration for what I did next. I decided to monitor development applications in the local area to see if those sites were likely to contain native orchids. If I thought they might, I didn’t waste time trying to get permission from the landowner who was under no obligation to give it; I simply sneaked in, saved any orchids I found before the construction work began, and made good my escape. Ironically, saving orchids in this way is not granted the same leeway as a bulldozer crushing them. I was breaking the law. This made me nervous – the penalties are quite severe: £5,000 per uprooted plant or six months in prison – but after some thought, even that did not dissuade me. These laws are well-intentioned, meant to deter the greedy and selfish – plant thieves and collectors – but as legislation designed to protect our environment, it was failing. Saving those fascinating plants was the moral thing to do. So I did it. And I didn’t stop there. I lived in a little terrace house in a city in the far southwest. Very soon my back yard was filled with salvaged orchids – nothing particularly rare, but all of them, technically, illegally obtained. There were the regal deep purple steeples of Early Purples; the pink and white speckled feather-duster-looking clusters of Common Spotted and Southern Marsh; a few towers of Greater Butterfly orchids, with their merengue cheesecake birds-in-flight blooms and scent of lilies; the corkscrews of Autumn Lady’s-tresses; and Common Twayblades, with their twin round leaves and shaggy spires of green flowers with dangling snake’s-tongue-like petals. They were “my” refugee orchids. But there were too many. And they weren’t really mine. To solve the issue of overcrowding I decided to return them to where they belonged, back to the land. I thought the sight of these beautiful plants in conspicuous locations might raise people’s awareness of them and their plight, and maybe inspire others, just as they had inspired me. So began an unofficial guerrilla orchid rewilding programme. I planted them in various locations – parks, roadside verges, churchyards, beside sports fields – anywhere I thought they might survive. Then I created a laboratory in my kitchen for propagating orchid seeds (orchid seeds, by the way, are very, very small, more like dust, and they don’t germinate like any other plant seed in the world). I cobbled the process together with things I could get hold of – think Breaking Bad but with a pressure cooker, microwave, air purifier and weird soups made of swede, pineapple juice and agar to nurture the growing seeds. Over the years, my mission developed. There were successes and failures and, fortunately, I was not arrested. Along the way I realised that what I was doing mattered. In a small way I was making a difference. Today I am proud to be devoting time to saving a little part of our wonderful, complex, beautiful but far too threatened world for my son and all future generations. The Orchid Outlaw: On a Mission to Save Britain’s Rarest Flowers by Ben Jacob is published by John Murray Press at £20. Buy it from guardianbookshop.com for £17.60 Native UK orchids Keep your eyes peeled this month for these intriguing flowers Marsh helleborine (Epipactis palustris) With ivory, damask and yellow flowers hanging languidly from their stems this orchid easily matches its tropical cousins for beauty. Where they occur, these helleborines can be present in large numbers, filling the air with a scent of vanilla. Common twayblade (Neottia ovata) This inconspicuous common orchid has two broad oval leaves and small, light-green flowers like five-pointed stars, with the lowest two points stretched like a forked snake’s tongue. It can outlive a human by decades. Common or chalk fragrant orchid (Gymnadenia conopsea) One of three British fragrant orchids, it grows in dry, species-rich pastures and hay meadows. Its pinkish flowers each have a long nectar spur protruding from the back of the flower. Their dozens of little blooms form slender spires and produce a thick sweet scent. Creeping Lady’s-tresses (Goodyera repens) This dainty orchid has small, hairy, white, sweet-smelling flowers, which cluster around a hairy green stem. It looks a bit like an upright summer-flowering snowdrop. It’s most commonly located in Scottish and northern English pine forests. Pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis) The small densely packed flowers of this species can be white, coral pink, carmine, indigo or vibrant lilac. The opening flower spike forms a distinctive pyramidal shape. |