Tim Bannerman's Orchid Chronicles - Part 6 - Hunting the Bee in Britain
ORCHIDS 6 – To Bee or not to Bee
It is a bright, blustery day. White, fluffy clouds are scudding over the top of the sweep of White Sheet Down. It’s early June. You are glad.
1979.
Glad to be a month married to Gill. Glad to be out on a hill in Wiltshire with your wife and her little boy she brought with her into your new life together. Glad you are no longer digging holes along the side of the A303 in bitter winter cold. Glad you are an actor, earning some kind of living for your family, precarious or not.
Ahead of you is a new life. Beyond you is the old castle mound of Mere. You are looking out over the little town around which all is green. You can hear the A303, carrying its contrapuntal stream of cars going up and down just beneath the hill. Up to London. Down to Somerset, Devon and the end of the land, the crashing tip of Cornwall where the sea meets the last firm place for you to stand and face whatever fate has in store.
But up here, on Zeals Knoll, you are on a quest.
Someone has told you there are orchids up here. In the Red Lion, Kilmington, perhaps, just over there, where the A303 of the Stone Age, the Hard- or Harrow Way, is making its ancient, deep, indented way over White Sheet Down from Canterbury in Kent to Seaton in Devon. Brushing past the South wall of Bill Lucy and Mrs Shepherd’s all-too-welcoming pint of local cider and the settle by the fire, it continues past the grand Palladian sweep of Stourhead, so cocksure in its simplicity and its plain, nothing-to-prove portico. And just beyond, the triangular tip of Alfred’s Tower pokes up above the trees before the whole of Wiltshire slides down into Somerset.
Someone has told you there are orchids up here. And not just orchids but a particular prize. The Bee Orchid. Ophrys apifera. ‘Ophrys’, Greek for ‘eyebrow’. ‘Apifera’, Latin – ‘bee-bearing’ or ‘bee-bringing’. Which you have never seen.
You know what it looks like from pictures. And how it is described:
Bee Orchid. Ophrys apifera Huds. 15-50 cm. Leaves five to nine, broadly lanceolate; bracts longer than the ovary. Inflorerescene lax, two to ten flowered, not very variable. Sepals broad, normally pale or bright pink, sometimes whitish; petals variable, normally less than half the length of sepals, green or more rarely pink; lip oval with pronounced hairy side lobes; central lobe with greenish, backwards pointing appendage; deep red-brown with a variable yellow pattern.
Yes, ok, but what does it really look like? What does it feel like to be Bee Orchid? How does it fit into the scheme of things, in the mad profusion of grasses and other plants and flowers? There’s so much going on down there. Kidney vetch, ‘bacon-and-egg’ bird’s foot trefoil, clover, eye-bright, speedwell, blue, pink, white. Is that a gentian? No, too soon, surely. Unless – Gentianella anglica? The Early Gentian? Wish I knew more about these things.
And the butterflies – Marbled Whites, Chalkhill and Adonis blues, Hair-streaks, green or brown, so hard to tell, Meadow Browns, or Brown Argus? The poor old Dingy Skipper or is it Grizzled? You wish Pete was here to tell you what they all are. Duke of Burgundy Fritillary – is it? The fritillary that isn’t. All feeding off the thyme and vetch and last-gasp cowslips that so recently covered the short downland turf in a carpet of marmalade-scented yellow. When you, criminally these days, picked a bunch of them, with bluebells to set them off, at dawn the day we had our blessing ceremony in Stourton Church, for Gill to carry up the pale blue carpet up to the altar. Where you were waiting, nervously listening for the tick of the old clock in the ancient, grey stone tower above the smiling, murmuring gathering in this little church overlooking the lake in Stourhead Gardens where you had played Hamlet the year before, with Gill in the audience, with whom later you had gone to pick the grapes in Bordeaux.
You remember frost on the roof of your tent, with Leo only 5 and made a fuss of by the old women in their head-scarves in the chateau. The long trestle tables where you gathered during the vendange in the evenings after a hard day’s picking, drinking the fine fourth or fifth, who cared, wine of Chateau d’Issans from plain bottles and singing ‘Et glou et glou et glou’ with the other pickers at the top of your voices.
And those bottles with the wax tops that your friend you’d met that morning in the campsite shop gave you and Gill to drink in return for helping him winch down his late-great-aunt’s piano from the third floor of her narrow house in the village perché in the Charente. That was after picking ceps and chanterelles in the wood, which you then ate with eggs and Jambon de Bayonne, carved in thin slices just then from the hanging haunch, while he opened these ancient bottles, found covered in dust and cobwebs in the cellar of his late-great-aunt, God bless her worsted stockings.
Vidor’s Toccata merging into Handel’s Messiah dissolving into Faure’s Pie Jesu by the end. How old was that wine? Perhaps a Pomerol, thought our benefactor. Pre-war probably, Second – or First? It was orange with the sediment rendering one side of the bottle opaque within its label-less, dust-coated, deep green glass. And before even the first drop unrolled on your tongue, your nose started singing.
Up there, invisible above Zeals Knoll, the Skylarks are laughing at you in their tiny, high-pitched, angelic, sing-song, distant playground way. Silly man, they sing, tee-hee, hasn’t got a clue. About anything. Head in the clouds. Blind as a bat. Can’t even find what’s under his nose, let alone out there in the big, wide world. Unlike us. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Hee-hee-hee-hee.
And now you notice someone else nearby, unmistakably on the hunt, bent low, his camera, so much more sophisticated than anything we possessed, swinging at the ready from his neck.
“Excuse me,” you say, approaching him. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Well, yes,” he replies, in a serious but friendly tone. “I usually find Apifera up here at this time of year.”
“Really? The Bee Orchid?” you say. “I’ve been told that but I’ve never seen one. Here or anywhere else.”
“Oh,” he says. “You’ve got a treat in store then. No guarantees but when you find one, there’s almost bound to be others. They just swim into focus after that first one.”
“We saw the Twayblades and the Common-spotteds on the way up but it would be so nice to see the Bee.”
So you look and Gill looks while Leo wanders about, chasing butterflies. And just when you are about to give up, standing up, feeling it in your back after all that bending down, you look down.
There, literally between your feet, you see something that looks like a bee. A buzzy, bumbly type of bee. Burying its head into a little pink flower with its furry bottom sticking out.
You bend down for a closer look.
It’s not a bee. It’s – a Bee! And it’s perfect. Just as the books describe but so much more real, more rich, more dazzlingly – uncanny. John Langhorne, the 18th century Cumbrian poet and parson caught it:
See, on that flow’ret’s velvet breast
How close the busy vagrant lies!
His thin-wrought plume, his downy breast,
The ambrosial gold that swells his thighs.
Perhaps his fragrant load may bind
His limbs; - we’ll set the captive free –
I sought the living bee to find
And found the picture of a bee.
How can a flower mimic an insect like that in such an extraordinary way? One must presume it has done so to attract the male insect it resembles for a spot of how’s-your-father in order to pollinate, having comprehensively fooled the male of the species – not hard in any species as we know – who thinks, wha-hey! She looks interesting. Smells good too. Think I’ll go and have a closer look.
But in the case of Ophrys apifera, it’s not even sex for a purpose, unlike many other insect-mimicking kinds of Ophrys orchid. Because Bee Orchids self-pollinate as a rule, which is how they’ve survived so successfully, in comparison with many other species. So just an insurance policy then. Or – could it be – pleasure?
Hugo de Vries, a big fan and contemporary of Darwin at the time The Theory of Evolution came out, talks some 40 years later in his Theory of Mutation about a ‘co-evolutionary process’ or kind of ‘arms race’ between flower and insect, resulting in near-perfect mimicry between the two. While Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne, an amateur botanist of the same period who also happened to be a senior judge in Algeria at the time, saw it all in terms of sex.
“Man can be misled in his sexual motivation by substitutes and hidden persuaders are the basis of advertisement of many products, not only the obvious in the sex industry,” wrote someone I noted down.
So insects availed themselves of a form of anthropomorphic sex doll if you like, way before us, sad creatures that we are. And should God have had a hand in all this, well, there might be some interesting questions to ask.
But it does make you realise, as Darwin said: “The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations, slowly acquired… transcend in an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could invent.”
And he was right, our orchid-hunting friend up on Zeals Knoll. Suddenly they were everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but now you could see them. And Leo too, with the odd trample here and there.
White Sheet Down, just above our little, freezing, rented farm cottage, was quite a treasure trove where orchids were concerned. One prize among the many that we found was a tiny orchid that is hard, at first, to distinguish from the thyme and clover in which it grows.
Ustulata – meaning ‘slightly burnt’ – Neottinea ustulata to give it its full name, has reduced in numbers frighteningly over the last 50 years or so and whether we would still find it up on the back of White Sheet Down, in its late flowering form, I don’t know. But it is one of those flowers that the more you study it, the more you marvel at its intricate colouring and form, with its deep, smoking-jacket purple helmet, white three-lobed lip stippled with delicate red spots, like a milk-pale child with measles.
The first one we found was on 27th July 1980, the first Bee, on 7th July 1979 – two of so many noted down in the back of our 1978 First Edition of Williams, Williams and Arlott’s Orchids of Britain and Europe which conveniently had a checklist at the back where you can note the locality and date of where you found them, continuing through to the present day – if we remember to put them in.
But the Burren, over on the North-West coast of County Clare in Ireland, was something else again where flowers are concerned and the destination we chose for our first family trip in our first family car, a 1951 Austin A40 Devon, bought for the eye-watering sum of £600, of which more to come – with a baby!
A Burnt Orchid with a fuzzy bee in the background
