Tim Bannerman's ORCHID CHRONICLES 13 – Military Matters Part 2 – The Quiet
“The soldiers are at home in their fields” came the message on a post-card in the late Spring of 1956.
What could this mean? The End of the War? If so, what war? Whose soldiers? Which fields? Where?
In fact, this cryptic communication was sent from two botanists, Francis Rose and Richard Fitter, to another botanist, Job Edward ‘Ted’ Lousley, a well-known authority on our native orchids and wild plants in general. So – why?
Because it so happened that Ted, a banker by trade when he wasn’t botanising, was the protective holder of a Great Secret in the world of British Orchidacae. And the other two had just found out what it was.
Wild orchids, in this country, range from the relatively common Early Purple Orchid to the Holy Grail of the Ghost Orchid, with 50 or so varieties of increasing rarity in between. From the immortal John Gerard onwards, they have fascinated and bewitched botanists and botanophiles like me over the last 400 years or so.
Gerard’s Herbal, or Generall Historie of Plantes, was first published in 1597 and if I had the £10,000 or more required to buy it, it would be sitting on my bookshelves alongside the beautiful 1904 reproduction of John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris, “faithfully reprinted” from the edition of 1629.
I found the Parkinson in the much-missed George’s Secondhand & Antiquarian Bookshop in Park Street in Bristol when we were living there, just after Gill and I got married in 1979. It cost me an eye-watering £80 but was so appropriate, so monumental (and it is a Big Book) and so all-encompassingly gorgeous that it had to be. I gave it to Gill, with what I hoped was a suitable inscription – an evocation of the Walled Garden at Nettlecombe in West Somerset where we’d met two years before – and it has travelled with us ever since.
It is also the only botanical joke I know – which may be unfair as I know some very funny botanists, alongside the rather more earnest variety. The joke being the pun in the title. ‘Paradisi in Sole’ – Park-in-Sun.
But it is Gerard, not Parkinson, that mentions a particular orchid – one, perhaps, that he half-inched from another herbal, as he was prone to do, but maybe not – that became, for us, something very close to home.
The orchid was called Souldier’s Cullions. In modern parlance, not sparing your blushes – Soldier’s Balls. Perhaps another joke, you never know? The reason for the last part of the name was a handsome pair of underground tubers, not unlike testicles to look at, as Theophrastus found when he named them in the 3rd century BC. The reason for the first part – ‘Souldier’s’ – is best described by Gerard himself in this extract from his Herbal:
“12. Soldier's Satyrion bringeth forth many broad large and ribbed leaves, spread upon the ground like unto those of the great plantain: among the which riseth up a fat stalk full of sap or juice, clothed or wrapped in the like leaves even to the tuft of flowers, whereupon do grow little flowers resembling a little man having a helmet upon his head, his hands and legs cut off, white upon the inside, spotted with many purple spots, and the back part of the flower of a deeper colour tending to redness. The roots be greater than any of the other kinds of Satyrions.” Interestingly, he makes no mention of the little man’s little willy, sticking out between his legs.
Parkinson, 30 years later, makes no mention of ‘Soldier’s Satyrion’, let alone ‘Souldier’s Cullions’ in his relatively brief list of “Orchides, Satyrions, and the reft of that kind” but does mention, under the heading of “The Vertues” that: “All the kindes of Orchis are accounted to procure bodily luft, as well the flowers diftilled, as the rootes prepared. The rootes boyled in red Wine, and afterwards dryed, are held to bee a fingular good remedie against the bloody Flixe.”
With regard to the above, this might be a good moment to mention one Very Important Point of Practice, here and now, whether or not you might feel a flagging of the libido or suffer from a particularly nasty form of dysentery:
Orchids, whether in abundance or heroic solitude, MUST NOT BE PICKED.
Similarly, many other flowers that my mother, or I in my younger days, might have gathered in armfuls, such as Cowslips or Bluebells, are now protected by law from being uprooted if not actually picked. This is because, over the years, they have become scarce, admittedly more because of changes in agricultural methods and loss of habitat than picking. But although we may see banks of cowslips and woodfuls of bluebells in a good year in the right place, they are always vulnerable in these times of changing climate and developers’ charters and ultimately give more pleasure to more people out there in the wild, let alone their importance to bees, butterflies and other insects, than in a vase at home.
I confess that on or around my daughter Amy’s birthday, on 20th April, both she and I have been known to pick a bunch of bluebells to mark the day in a bluebell way. But they flop over all too quickly and are much better left to grow and thrive, year after year, unpicked, uncrushed, in their elusive blue that no photograph can ever do justice to. Nevertheless, moderate picking of common flowers where the plants are abundant, is not illegal – except in specific cases which can be identified, and should be checked against the Code of Conduct on the Wild Flower Society web page.
The first accurate and verified British recording of Orchis militaris or the Military Orchid, by which name Soldier’s Cullions came to be known, is by William Browne, who lived in the middle years of the 17th century. George Claridge Druce, a renowned Oxfordshire botanist and chemist, whose 1897 edition of his Flora of Berkshire I have on my shelves, gives a detailed description of Browne’s life and achievements. This includes finding and correctly identifying the Military Orchid “on several chalkey hills neer the high way from Wallingford to Redding on the Barkshire side of the river (Thames)”, as mentioned by Christopher Merrett in his Pinax Rerum Naturalium Britannicarum of 1666, the same year as The Great Fire of London, following on from the Great Plague the year before. And we think we’ve got problems.
Sadly, by the time George Druce came to look for it, as he recounts in his Flora of Oxfordshire of 1886: “I have only found it during the last four years very sparingly. It only appeared in a barren state in 1886.” This was largely the result of the progressive ploughing up of chalk downland over the previous hundred years or so but also due to over-picking, not least by botanists. And when Ted Lousley came on the scene some 50 years later as the highly-regarded, if amateur botanist he was, the Military Orchid had become an almost mythical creature.
As you might expect with the cut-and-thrust of a name like that, Orchis militaris attracted a clutch of Colonels keen to hunt out this elusive cove. The best of them was a certain Colonel M.J. Godfrey. With his wife, Hilda, as illustrator, Cambridge University Press published in 1933 what became the standard work for many years on the subject of our native orchids.
I waited 40 years before getting my hands on Godfrey’s wonderful Monograph & Iconograph of Native British Orchidacae and, finally, last week – I am still a little breathless – a fine, first edition copy arrived in my little corner of Herefordshire, thanks to the sleuthing of my favourite book-finder, Josh Green, of Green Ink Books at Hay-on-Wye.
For all Hilda’s beautiful illustrations, the Military Orchids she painted were found not in the British Isles but in the Savoie, in South-East France, where her husband describes them, as I imagine him with the peak of Mont Blanc dominating the horizon above his questing Colonel’s nose, as having “a delicious honey-like scent”.
Godfrey never found the Military Orchid in the British Isles but the book itself has a commanding presence, even if slightly out of date these days.
A little later, Jocelyn Brooke, an almost forgotten author now, though much praised by the likes of Sir John Betjeman and Anthony Powell in the ‘40s and ‘50s, describes the Military Orchid as having “taken on a kind of legendary quality, its image seemed fringed with the mysterious and exciting appurtenances of soldiering, its name was like a distant bugle-call, thrilling and rather sad, a ‘cor au fond du bois’.”
My well-thumbed paperback copy of his delightful autobiographical novel in three parts called ‘The Orchid Trilogy’, of which the first book is called ‘The Military Orchid’, tells of his life-long quest to rediscover it in old and potentially new haunts. In his compendious monograph, ‘The Wild Orchids of Britain’, decoratively illustrated by the water-colours of Gavin Bone, of which I have no.597 of 1,140 copies published by The Bodley Head in 1950, he adds:
“The Soldier Orchid is now so rare that it is frequently rumoured to be extinct… It is possible that (Orchis) militaris still lingers on in a few secluded spots… but I have heard no recent news of it, and it seems all too probable that this charming orchid has gone the way of scarlet and pipe-clay, Ouida’s guardsmen and the more romantic appurtenances of soldiering.”
Despite his best efforts here and abroad, he never found it, even though he had the reward of many smaller, yet still thrilling discoveries along his flower-strewn path.
Which brings us back to Ted Lousley, who gets an anonymous mention in Brooke’s footnote to his much ‘appurtenanced’ descriptions of the Military Orchid as follows:
“For some years before 1947 O. militaris had been presumed by most botanists to be entirely extinct; in this year, however, it was rediscovered in Buckinghamshire by a well-known botanist who, embittered no doubt by former iniquities on the part of his colleagues, refuses to divulge its exact whereabouts.”
Coming clean in his book The Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone, first published in 1950, Ted Lousley at least tells us how he found it – if not where – one magical day in the merrie month of May three years before:
“The excursion was intended as a picnic, so I had left my usual apparatus at home and took only my notebook” (a man after my own heart). “But I selected our stopping-places on the chalk with some care, and naturally wandered off to see what I could find” (no doubt leaving his wife and child – should he have had one – to fend for themselves as usual). “To my delight I stumbled on the orchid just coming into flower…. Careful plotting showed that there were 39 plants in the colony and that 18 of them had thrown up flower spikes. Of these, the 5 most exposed had the flower-stems bitten right off – almost certainly by rabbits.”
It took 9 years before the Great Secret of its whereabouts was revealed to other botanists and not until 1975, just before Ted died and nearly 30 years after he’d rediscovered it, that its presence was announced to the public by the press as “The Beauty that must blossom in secret”. Finally, towards the end of the 1980s, carefully managed and protected, the location was opened to the public, where we went to pay homage one May in the late 1990s.
The first time ever I saw its face was not in England however. It was on an excursion with my patron and mentor, the late and greatly missed Michel Fustier, when I was working on a new piece for my embryonic ‘Learning and Development’ theatre company we had set up together in 1989 with a consultancy in Maidenhead called MaST International.
By 1991, MaST Theatre, as we called it, later to become AKT Productions Ltd., was gathering momentum and I had gone down to Michel’s flat in Lyons in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region of France to work on a play commissioned by Volvo to help sell their new range of cars.
We were engaged in an intense creative process to try to get the groundwork done in the short time we had. This involved Michel lying Proust-like on a chaise-longue in his flat, while I sat writing at the table, frantically trying to keep pace with capturing Michel’s flood of ideas for the evolving plot of our play. To give ourselves a much-needed break, I suggested a walk.
Scattering madeleines in all directions, Michel leapt to his feet and said we must head for the hills, and off we set in his little car on the bonny bright May morning it was.
As we drove up past Couzon-au-Mont d’Or, I spotted a track leading off the road and suggested we pull off and see what we might find in the way of flora. Michel, being less enthusiastic about the flowery things of life, said he would have a little snooze while I had a wander.
It wasn’t long before I was up on a high, South-facing, chalky slope, having made my way up a tangled path, my senses never more alive. This tingling awareness was heightened by coming round a corner and, just where my foot was about to fall, meeting a vipère, or adder, happily sunning itself on the path. I don’t know who was more frightened, me or the adder, but we parted company relatively amicably and as my heart-rate settled I came upon a wide open field.
On one half, working its way up, was a tractor, ploughing into the chalky soil. On the other half – well, this is what I wrote:
“I saw pale pink first, small heads showing through the meadow crush of stalks and shades. Fuschii (the Heath-spotted Dactylorhiza Orchid), I thought, or Maculata (Common-spotted ditto), but too early or, no, coming closer, leaves wrong, no spots, too broad, and in a rush now up to the head – my God! Militaris, the Military orchid, Soldier, never seen in England, by us, or many, if at all. Scarce, secret, almost sacred. And here, 10, 20, more, just opening, smaller than I thought, stretching out of pale, peaked hoods, slim, thrust tongue – the soldier, flushing to his hands and boots, speckled chest well out and down to where his breeches part and a tiny prick sticks out.”
It was quite exciting, I have to admit.
Alongside my ecstatic state at stumbling on this treasure, I was then reminded of the tractor and what it was doing as it worked its way up the field – towards the orchids. No! But what could I do?
Where we lived in Normandy there was another treasure that we’d never seen before, growing in fantastic profusion just up the lane from our house and even one or two in our orchard. It was Himantoglossum hircinum, the Lizard Orchid.
The French call it Orchis bouc or the Goat Orchid. The reason for this we discovered after I rescued one magnificent specimen from 80 or 90 being mowed up by an over-conscientious bank trimmer working his way round the lanes. Although too late to save them on that occasion, being local inhabitants I felt emboldened to ask our village mayor’s secretary, a serious and sympathetic man (unlike his brow-beating boss), if he could put in a word to allow the main swathe of Lizard Orchids to flower until they had set their seed in future years to avoid the risk of losing them altogether, which he agreed to do. Whether this actually happened I shall never know as we had to leave before the next Spring but I do hope so.
For so many French people, or English for that matter, flowers are either ‘blue’ or ‘red’ or ‘pink’ and as for orchids, most people have no idea what they are. Not so much of a problem in England where some of them are so rare – the Lizard Orchid for example – that you’d have to be playing golf on the links at Sandwich in Kent to have any risk of damaging or flattening one. But in Normandy, they were everywhere so – what’s the problem? Or so they might think.
The Lizard Orchid I ‘saved’ I brought back to the house where we put it in a jar of water and examined it.
It was 103 centimetres in length, top to bottom. That’s nearly 3½ feet tall! And it had 110 flowers on one flower spike, its long, unfurling, corkscrew labella (that’s tongues to you and me) falling like yellow ribbons on a maypole and forking at the end. Just like the adder I met when he stuck his tongue out at me.
After an hour or two however, both Gill and I started to feel rather strange, slightly light-headed, otherworldly, then definitely odd, verging on full-blown hallucinating psychosis. And then we realised – it was the orchid.
The scent, while being no doubt very attractive to flies and certain types of bees, smells nothing less than of a billy goat on heat. Or worse. According to a friend of Jocelyn Brooke, it reminded him of the battlefields of Flanders which he’d been both unfortunate to experience and fortunate to have survived.
Anne Pratt was a 19th century botanical illustrator and author of more than 20 botanical books at a time when a self-taught grocer’s daughter was not given the recognition that, in her case, she certainly deserved. Evidently where the Lizard Orchid was concerned she had no qualms in calling a spade a spade. Her verdict on the smell? “Perfectly disgusting!” I can hear Margaret Thatcher concur.
So we learned the hard way about the effect of the Lizard on the central nervous system and I have often wondered what potential medicinal uses it and other orchids might be put to in the realms of aroma therapy, let alone the likes of Novichok & co.
Up there, in the Auvergne, I had to leave the Military Orchids to their fate and it was 5 years before the day came when, with a little help along the way, we found a very special place, much, much closer to home.
One of the enjoyable aspects of hunting for orchids is bumping into other orchid-hunters, usually on a hill or in a wood at the height of orchid season – April to July, for the most part – who form useful indicators of where something interesting might be found.
Even after 40 years or more or of tracking them down, it can still be fiendishly difficult to spot, say, a Frog Orchid, Coeloglossum viride, which, as the second part of its name suggests, is mostly green. And very, very small. Although when you do find one – and a place called Noar Hill, near Selborne in Hampshire, is a very good place to look, particularly down in the lower part of the Mediaeval chalk workings near the track at the bottom – you find that it is much more subtle and complex than it first appears, like all orchids for that matter. And Noar Hill has at least 12 varieties of orchid growing over Spring and Summer that we have identified over the years from when we lived nearby in Alton.
One of the many people we have bumped into along the way told us not only of the well-known sites for such as the Monkey Orchid, Orchis simia and the spectacular Lady Orchid, Orchis purpurea, in Kent and Oxfordshire, but some even more special sites as well, ones that require a good level of trust in both imparter and receiver of this privileged information.
Regarding the statuesque, crinoline spread of white, pink and purple displayed by the Lady Orchid, apart from the handful of specialist conservation sites here in the UK, we got to know the Lady Orchid well in the woods behind our house in Tordouet in the Pays d’Auge. There it grew in clusters like flushed debutantes at a ‘Coming-out Ball’ alongside Butterfly, Bird’s Nest, White helleborine, Twayblade, Common Spotted and the last Early Purple Orchids, as well as many other plants, of course, including the delicate and much more unusual True Oxlip, Primula elatior.
For those who have never seen it in this country – and unless you live in East Anglia you are very unlikely to have done – you can distinguish it from the common False Oxlip by the fact that its small, pale yellow flowers all point in one direction. Our little patch in Tordouet grew at one end of the wood where there was a pure, bubbling spring that fed one of the three douets or little streams that flowed on down through the valley. It was a very magical, even spiritual spot. Good for spells, prayers and blessings, should you have need for them.
But back to our friend with the privileged information.
The name of a wood, that was all he gave us. He couldn’t remember exactly where but “somewhere in the Chilterns”. A wood, however, whose name we discovered after much pouring over large scale OS maps, miraculously within easy reach of where we lived in the lee of the Chilterns on our return to England from our time in France.
“Below the wood”, he said. “Have a look below the wood. From the beginning of May. I think you’ll like what you see, with any luck.”
Conscious of the confidential nature of the information, which we swore we would respect, we set off at the end of May, too late, perhaps, we feared, to find this fabled beast, this unicorn, which might or might not inhabit this wood with its Spencerian name, not uncommon in many more ancient woodlands in this sceptred isle of ours.
We parked our car just off the narrow lane and, with beating hearts, set off through the wood on the evening of this “close, too warm, first day of Summer”, as I described it in my notebook on 30th May, 1996.
The bluebells were going over but the scents of sweet woodruff, sweet briar, honeysuckle and the rich mossy reek of the green carpet beneath our feet filled our senses to the expectant brim as we walked down the gentle slope towards a stile at the lower edge.
Climbing over the stile, we found ourselves above a steeper slope of undisturbed chalk downland grass, the sweet briar drifting its succulence like warm currents in a sea as we made our way, slowly and carefully down.
Then we saw a little cage of staked rabbit wire with green wires crossed above it and something, some things, pale and not so pale within.
“Et – voilà! Five pure spikes of Orchis militaris, nearly all in their finest flush, florets broad and breathing, Crimean moustachioes swept wide in their Imperial mauve. A good foot high, the tallest, the others 9 inches and upwards. Inside the pale, almost white hood (all opening upwards, unlike the Orchis simia, the Monkey Orchid), fine veins, a là Green-Winged Orchid, can be seen, dark and horizontal, shielding the source of procreation. The tallest must have some 30 flowers on its spike, the smallest 15. And all alone together, in a tight clump with broad, glossy-green, apple-green leaves, blading up together. And above, the Red Kite soars and flicks away, spread-fingered in the wind while the Whitebeam and the Beech exhale a strong sea of sounds, sighing out their melancholy supervision of these brave subalterns, subject to all manner of depravity should some sick character come along or even, by some freak, a natural disaster strike. They are quite unlike, so much more aristocratic, dare one say it, in the purest sense, than other orchids. Or perhaps not. Maybe it’s just the moment of discovery that endows such dignity and valour to these last-of-their-line crusaders. With the poignancy that my children’s children may well never know this feast in solitude.”
Strangely, I don’t mention its particular scent that the books describe as being of new-mown hay or coumarin, perhaps because my nose was already too full of sweet briar and all the other scents of that richly fragrant evening.
Anyway, so speaks my diary of that day of first discovery. On our doorstep.
And then most years, if not quite every one, we returned to see them, to make sure they were still there and thriving. Which indeed they were and did.
In a selection of diaries, up to the last one before we left to live in Herefordshire, the numbers rose from 6 in ’98, to 116 ten years later, to 190 in 2010, to 212 in 2011. 212! Which gives one hope that the care and seclusion granted to these vulnerable beings has more than paid off as they have spread from their containment across the patch of downland, the protective caging failing to keep up with their exuberant fecundity.
So maybe my children’s children will share the privilege of seeing the Military Orchid, and the company it keeps. The elusive Fly Orchid, Ophrys insectifera, so hard to see, like grass stalks with little inky, velvety flies resting on them, tucked up within the brambles and briars as they tend to be around the edges of the wood. And, of course, the Greater Butterfly Orchid, Platanthera chlorantha, distinguished from its Lesser cousin by the wide open pollinia, that we first found in a Gloucestershire wood purely by its intense, honey scent and, on investigating, found ourselves in a world that Arthur Rackham would have envied and, no doubt, anthropomorphised in his signature way.
And all, for the most part, in The Quiet.
We can but hope in our small island that some Quiet will persist, despite the best efforts of what some call ‘Progress’ and others desecration. And infecting those you love with a similar joy to yours in the treasures to be found, out there, in The Quiet, is one way to help preserve it.
