Tim Bannerman's Orchid Chronicles - Part 4 - Murram Magic and the Drooping Phallus
When Pad and I finally returned to Langata, we were tired and dirty but full of the exhilaration that had never left us from our orchid-hunting adventures.
We’d travelled 3,000 miles with Roger Polhill, the laughing botanist from Kew we’d met by a coincidence of the fates in Khartoum Airport. Thanks to him and Herbie, the venerable Landcruiser with the heart of gold, we had made it from Nairobi in Kenya to Lusaka in Zambia via Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania with many a marsh, mountain and game park in between – without a hitch. The way back, on the other hand, without Roger, or Herbie, was one long series of hitches, with the odd bus ride in between.
View from Herbie the Landcruiser’s windscreen
I forget so much of the detail now. We were too busy being to record things in notes or photographs even, sadly. But some things remain, 45 years on or no.
I will never forget sleeping under the stars at the People’s Bakery in Tanzania, with our toes to the fire, squeezed, in my case, between a plump and jolly Zaire diamond smuggler, or so he claimed, on one side and a melancholy skin-and-bone ‘gentleman roader’ on the other. It was an interesting night enlivened by hysterical frogs, ground-shaking snores from the smuggler and heart-breaking sighs from the roader, and in the precious, quieter moments, just the soothing ticks and cracks of the cooling embers from the open hearth of the bakery fire. At last falling into a profound and exhausted sleep, seconds later I was woken by Dante’s Inferno being applied by Torquemada’s most talented pupils to the soles of my feet. It was dawn. The fire was relit. The bellows in full, explosive action. And the delicious smell of freshly baked bread already perfuming the air. I am alive, I thought. And it is good.
The other experience branded on my memory was of being deep into murram road country coming up through Tanzania. In a world where vehicles are few and far between, the footsore traveller is dependent on the kindness or capability of each passing vehicle and driver to make any kind of headway along the endless, rough red roads that forge their way across the wilderness around you. So when the middle-sized Nissan truck came to a skidding halt in a cloud of dust having hurtled past us as we stuck out our thumbs without a great deal of hope, we thought, well, may St. Christopher be with us, or his African equivalent. It’s a lift and we should be grateful.
Having agreed on a modest exchange of payment for a seat next to the driver, as opposed to joining the numberless souls in the canvas-covered back, we set off. At a pace which defied the logic of any truck, middle-sized or otherwise.
Murram roads consist of a semi-hard packed ‘dirt’ base, usually corrugated laterally to the point of direction, sometimes deeply grooved along the track, particularly round corners, and always subject to becoming either a dust storm behind you in the dry season, or a river in the wet. The art in the dry, we learned quite quickly, was to go fast enough to ride the corrugations rather than be bounced from one to the other, a bit like trotting on a horse.
In our case, that day, and for several days subsequent to that, I seem to remember, it was dry. Unlike when coming the other way in Herbie in a tropical monsoon in which it was a challenge to know what was road and what was bush, let alone maintain any consistent level of control or forward momentum even at times, four-wheel drive or not.
I pride myself on a level of car control – with the odd mishap along the way, pace Martin and The Incident of The Gate – learned at the wheel of a battered Mk 1 MG Midget called Buzz which had no road-holding but wonderful handling. Wonderful that is if you like spending a bit too much of your life looking through the jaundiced side-screens with the steering-wheel on full opposite lock (NB – only recommended on disused airfields or the race track). And I have been a passenger with drivers who have taken me round racing circuits at well beyond the normal limits of adhesion, in the knowledge that they knew exactly what they were doing, or so one hoped, at speeds beyond the ton.
I have never, ever, before or since, experienced what our African friend achieved on roads rougher than a Welsh forest rally stage.
After an hour of still being alive, despite concern for the passengers in the back who you could hear and feel behind you being crunched from one side of the truck to the other as we swung from one corner to another, I began to realise the reality here. We not only had a genius at the wheel but a rival for Lewis Hamilton – or James Hunt as it was in those days.
The way he set up the truck for the next corner well before we reached it so that the sideways drift of all four wheels took off any excess speed without the need to brake, positioning the truck perfectly to hold it in a balanced slide, controlled purely by the throttle, was breathtaking. Half the time, he would be talking to us, lighting another cigarette, while holding the wheel with one hand – my God, Fangio himself would have been lost for words, let alone Stirling Moss.
Not once did we fall off the road, despite defying the laws of physics on a permanent basis. Of course that’s why we got back so fast in comparison to our leisurely progress in Herbie, as forests, bush, marshlands and mountains flashed by in a blur a botanist would abhor.
Even so, I was able to play back through my mind the kaleidoscopic colour and dizzy-making scent of those flowers we had been so privileged to both see and smell, as well as collect.
It wasn’t just orchids though that we had collected. Roger’s presses were bulging with all manner of plants, from the spectacular Gloriosa Superba to the smaller varieties of Gladiolus – and that’s just a few of the Gs.
One plant in particular sticks in my mind if not, fortunately, anywhere else. And Pad has a memory of me emerging triumphantly with it from the undergrowth, having gone off to do what the elephants did around our tent at Arusho.
Squatting, as every seasoned orchid-hunter will know, is one of the best ways to spot those elusive plants that escape detection from normal standing height or when moving. Sitting still in a squat, suddenly a whole new world emerges of individual leaves and flowers, insects and the miniature ecology of the forest floor around you.
It was then that I spotted something different, something surprising, disturbing even, that I hadn’t seen before. On completing my business in the usual fashion, I kept my eyes on this thing and went over to inspect it more closely. It had an almost fungal quality to it and yet was evidently a flowering plant of some kind.
Under most circumstances, it is usually wrong to pick plants in the wild for the very good reason that they are vulnerable to reduction in quantity at best, extinction at worst.
A classic example of this in the UK is the fabled Cypripedium calceolus or Lady’s Slipper Orchid, which was too tempting not to pick in its heyday a hundred or more years ago and was then reduced still further by changes in its environment due to woodland clearance and overgrazing. With the consequence that it virtually disappeared except for, at its worst, a single surviving plant in what became a secret location ‘somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales’. Things have improved over the last few years thanks to a concerted programme of conservation, hand-pollination and reintroduction in a policed and controlled environment protected from general knowledge of its location.
But on an official collecting trip on East Africa with the Man from Kew, we were there specifically to collect and record the plants we found for a serious scientific purpose.
So, very carefully, I picked this strange plant I’d spotted, with as much root as possible, and emerged clutching what, to put it politely, looked distinctly rude. To put it less politely, it resembled nothing more than an erect and handsome penis, emerging from an efflorescence round its base.
“Look what I’ve found,” I said to Pad and Roger, demonstrating a literal version of the famous cricketing double-entendre (‘the bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey’, if you remember). They both, predictably, laughed and Pad brought his camera to bear. Just as he was about to press the shutter, the penis in my hand decided, out of shyness perhaps, to lose its proud and undeniably impressive erection and flop into something rather less so.
“Oh dear,” I said. “That’s a shame’. As one might in a romantic moment when, for one reason or another, things went awry. Oh, come on, we’ve all been there… Haven’t we?
“What is it?” I asked Roger and he replied: “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the Amorphophallus family but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one before.”
Roger, now, not far off 50 years and a few million plants later, has no recollection of this momentous event in my plant-hunting career – whatsoever. Pad, though, kindly assures me that somewhere in the bowels of the Herbarium at Kew, there exists a pressed flop of an Amorphophallus abyssinicus ssp. Bannermanii, duly named after its discoverer when having a dump in the bush somewhere between Nairobi and Lusaka.
I have mixed feelings about this. A part of me wants it to be true, of course. Another part is slightly conscious that it might be taken as a reflection in some way of its discoverer – not that I have anything to hide, I assure you, as those who know me well will tell you. Anyway, for better or worse, I have no photograph of the thing, Pad having lost his, so no way of way of proving it exists other than embarrassing myself at Kew. And it could have been worse, depending on how you look at it. It could have been Amorphophallus Titanum, or the Corpse Flower, which flowers once every 10 years, if you’re lucky, is toweringly vast and stinks overpoweringly of dead bodies. Mmmmh.
RIP Amorphophallus whatever-you-may-be-called – may you droop in peace.
Meanwhile, back from our travels, a bit further down from Charles’s Surrey villa in Langata, still alive and kicking from our breakneck ride, we called on an old friend of Pad’s who lived not far from Charles. He opened the door on our cheerful, grimy faces and instantly recoiled into the safety of the house.
“God you stink!,” he said. “Come back when you’ve had a wash.”
Despite being somewhat wounded by this less than friendly greeting, Pad and I had to agree that we needed a bath, or some form of deep cleansing to rid us of weeks without a proper wash. And so back to Charles and his life-in-aspic back in the villa.
After a week or two, Pad set off on his own to explore the remote wonders of Lake Rudolf, now known as Lake Turkana, on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia. The world’s largest desert lake and, equally, the world’s largest alkaline lake. With its Nile crocodiles and Hippopotamuses, let alone the vast and terrifying-looking varieties of fish, it’s not the best place for a dip. His main means of travel was the fish lorry so, on his return, he chose not to knock on his friend’s door again until he’d had several baths and burnt his clothes.
I, after playing chauffeur to Charles in his lovely old 1960s Mercedes 280 SE saloon (and taking it, unknown to Charles, for the odd spin on my own ‘to see what she could do’ – which was quite a bit), got a job at a local school, teaching 12 and 13 year old girls and boys the glories of Wordsworth and Keats up to Hopkins and Hardy and even a little bit beyond.
Until I got itchy feet and thought it was time to break free from Charles’s Regency bookcase with its First Edition morocco-bound volumes of Dickens, illustrated by Phiz, among many other treasures, for a last fling before deciding whether or not to take up my open ticket for home.
It wasn’t until I reached what was then the remote Island of Lamu, on the Kenya coast well North of Mombasa and approaching the Somalia border, after a long, hot and much-punctured bus journey (including a midnight swimming-pool encounter in Malindi with the naked American Ambassador to Tanzania and his equally naked girlfriend whom he was insistent should ‘go bathe naked in the moonlight, Gillian’ which I found rather appealing but Gillian didn’t), that two things happened to me.
The first was that for the first and perhaps only time in my life, I disappeared.
The second was that I started to yearn for the green sap of an English Spring.
Robert Browning "Home Thoughts From Abroad”
OH, to be in England now that April ’s there
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
II
And after April, when May follows
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That ’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could re-capture
The first fine careless rapture!
And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew, 1
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
