Tim Bannerman's NEW Orchid Chronicles
“The orchids grow in the woods and they let out their fragrance even if there is no one around to appreciate it. Likewise, men of noble character will not let poverty deter their will to be guided by high principles and morals.” – Confucius
Well, I’m not sure I ever quite lived up to that, certainly not during my time in West Somerset. Relative ‘poverty’, to be sure – name me a West Somerset journalist that lives in the lap of luxury. But ‘high principles and morals’? I fear my will may have been deterred along the way, from time to time.
However, poverty is only open to interpretation up to a point. Inner cities, famine, war, disease, unemployment, persecution, hunger, lack of love, despair, homelessness, no question. But, given that, does not the natural beauty of a landscape and its produce, let alone the characters that have been formed by it, bestow some kind of wealth, for free, if one is blessed to be ‘around to appreciate it’?
And sometimes, within a given landscape – its hills and valleys, woods and fields, moor and mountain, the very earth beneath your feet – there are special treasures. Priceless. Treasures that are often hidden. That have to be hunted out before they can be revealed.
Indeed it was my nose that revealed one particular orchid for the first time, in a wood in Gloucestershire, an orchid that we discovered we had walked past without seeing it – until the fragrance hit us and we stopped to really look.
But it took a series of critical experiences for me to know this particular treasure.
Orchids.
Sometimes tiny and seemingly insignificant, sometimes a technicolour extravaganza, sometimes not like a flower at all, and everything in between. Because orchids can be all these things and, like many seductive preoccupations, orchid hunting can be dangerously addictive.
Without my mother, I would not have known the names – the ‘common names’ that is – of so many familiar wild flowers that deck our lanes, woods and hedgerows every Spring in a brilliant sequence of colours and surprises. The first snowdrops, first primroses, violets, white and blue, cowslips, bluebells, stitchwort, greater and lesser, cuckoo flower, lords and ladies, wild garlic, lady’s smock, meadowsweet, windflowers, town hall clock, lady’s bedstraw, Herb Paris – the list goes on and on. And all because my mother made it a ritual, a reality, the ability to look, from a very early age. Even if I have to relearn so many of the names again each year.
Oh yes, we laughed at Stinking Willy and Nipplewort and Bloody Cranesbill because you would, wouldn’t you, when you were six. And kept on laughing every time you thought of it until you were nearly sick and nobody else found it funny any more. But you knew what it was, what it looked like, where to find it.
Which is the key to it all really. It’s so easy to walk and breathe and look out over rise and fall and see the sea in the distance – all marvellous, essential, to the delight of walking. But to see flowers and, crucially, identify them, you have to walk more slowly – not always popular in company – and look.
To see orchids, though, you have to know where and how to look. Not just for flowers, but for orchids. It took one person to show me how to look for orchids and he turned up in the least expected place.
The story of my awakening to orchids starts in Khartoum Airport in the Sudan in early December, 1974 when I was 21.
A friend and I had worked very hard on leaving university to scrape enough pennies together for the Adventure of a Lifetime – or anything rather than put on a suit and pretend to be a grown-up. He worked in a canning factory in Norfolk. I worked on a farm in Wincanton in Somerset.
I was recovering from a severe head injury incurred when my head hit the edge of a low brick wall very hard and ‘knocked my face off my skull’ as the surgeon told me. In fact I broke every bone in my head – skull, nose, cheekbones, jaw. A classic multiple maxillofacial trauma, to be technical, requiring reconstruction of misplaced or shattered bones and plastic surgery to cover up the worst of the damage. A triangular metal brace was screwed into my skull and attached to my jaw to lock my head together for quite a while after the operation. A slightly different angle of incidence and I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale – or incapable of telling it. I was actually a very lucky, if very stupid young man. How come?
I had been racing my bicycle along with several others around the Sidgwick Avenue Lecture Block in Cambridge to burn off steam before our Finals. The week before the moment of truth we decided to try our course out by night. Without recce-ing it first.
Pretty stupid, you might think – but we had raced round this particular lecture block so many times, we knew it by heart. Not by night though.
I went after my mate, Dave, and came round a sharp corner, inside pedal sending sparks off the tarmac. Going well, I thought.
Then everything went black.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a vague shape moving in my direction. It was Dave I discovered later, coming to warn me about the wall. The one you couldn’t see when the streetlight was cut off into near total darkness round the corner.
He went over the top. I made the mistake of starting to brake.
I hit the sharp bit at the top of the low wall where my forehead meets my nose. Very hard. And we had no helmets in those days.
It took two to three months of a slow recovery period after leaving hospital before I was fit enough to work and the farm down the road in Wincanton was perfect. Hard, physical work from harvest onwards into building the one and only monument to my skills as a brickie, or blockie, to be precise – a silage pit.
And come December, both my friend, Pad, and I had canned enough peas and laid enough blocks to buy the cheapest ticket available to Nairobi – via Frankfurt, Rome, Addis Ababa, Khartoum and, eventually, Nairobi. Once there, we knew we had shelter with an old family connection of mine in Langata, on the outskirts of Nairobi. But we had to get there first.
It was at our fourth stop in Khartoum, having narrowly escaped arrest for taking photographs of what looked like the last Spitfires in active service, if that was possible, parked on the apron nearby, that we staggered exhausted into the fairly basic airport lounge – but it had a bar.
Amongst a handful of crumpled customers as weary as us, one stood out. Not only bushy-tailed but bushy eye-browed with it. This sandy-haired character stood beaming benevolently at everyone around him while holding his fairly cold beer in one freckly hand.
‘I bet you he’s a botanist,’ I said to Pad as we approached the bar to take our place in the gap beside the bushy-tailed man in his baggy tropical shorts that just failed to cover a splendidly knobbly pair of knees.
It took less than 30 seconds for him to engage us with his twinkling eyes and ask us who we were and where we were going.
We’ve just left university, we said, and we’re going to Nairobi. To do what? he asked. We don’t know yet but we’re hoping to have an adventure, we said, sounding like something out of Arthur Ransome, or, God help me, Enid Blyton.
For the first time we heard the famous laugh. Like a cross between a hyena and a Maserati air-horn, it rang around the bar area, turning all heads towards us.
‘It looks like you need something to do’, he said. ‘You’d better come and help me. I could do with two fit young men to give a me hand over the next couple of months.’
Doing what? we asked.
‘I’m a botanist,’ he said. (I couldn’t resist a flicker to Pad). ‘From the Herbarium at Kew. Here on a collecting trip down through Kenya and Tanzania to Lusaka in Zambia. About 3,000 miles with a few diversions along the way. Would you like to come and camp with me and carry my presses and share the driving? I can’t pay you but I’ll provide the food and you can have as much beer as you can drink – when we’re not working – and we’ll share the cooking between us. What do you say?”
Pad and I looked at each other. Was this really happening? Not even at Nairobi yet and now…
‘I’ll pick you up just after Christmas,’ he said. My name’s Roger. Roger Polhill. And yours?’
