Orchids, like roses, are associated with sex. Dorothy Parker wrote
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet--
One perfect rose.
(She went on to complain:
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.)
Associations with orchids may also be similarly romantic or transactional. Shellfish, rosebuds or frothing champagne may be thought to have certain kinds of symbolism by those of you with a certain kind of imagination. (I write ‘you’ in case anyone is tempted to suppose that I have that kind of imagination). But at the earthy root, as it were, of the mystique of the orchid is the fact that the very word ‘orchid’ means ‘testicle’ in ancient Greek.
It was once believed that each orchid flower grew from a pair of bulbs or tubers. One of these, at any one time, would be shrivelled and shrinking as the result of providing the energy for the growth of the orchid flower in the spring, and the other one might grow and swell as the plant flourished in the summer sunshine. Obviously I’ve not dug up an orchid to check if this is true as they are rare and precious and protected. It seems a bit improbable to me, but the ancients, who were closer to nature than most of us moderns, were convinced that if you dug up an orchid you would find a small bulb and a large one, with contrasting sexual power, symbolism and sympathetic magic.
These tubers were dried and ground up by said ancients. The powder from the small ones, added to your man’s evening cocoa, might act as a contraceptive, or be helpful if you found his attentions troublesome. If, on the other hand, you wanted a child, or if he was a bit apt to start snoring when his head touched the proverbial, leaving you to find your own way of getting off to sleep, the powder from the big bulbs might be just what the wise woman ordered.
And yet, for plants with such fertile associations, it may seem strange that they are so rare now. You only find them in proper old hay meadows, occasionally on road verges: places where no farm chemicals have been applied.
When I cleared all the spruce trees that had been planted in my orchard and turned it back into a proper orchard, I managed to get all kinds of hay-meadow plants to grow from seed – things like hay rattle and ragged robin, cowslips and scabious. It was an almost instant success, except that it lacked two of the signature hay-meadow plants, the Early Purple and the Spotted Orchids.
I admit I toyed with the idea of digging some up. I tried to convince myself that it would be justified if it worked, because I would have created a new site where orchids thrived, and the site I had plundered would recover anyway. But I didn’t know how orchids reacted to being dug up, and although I’d once been prepared to break the law to protest about nuclear weapons, this was in my view a very different situation and several years went by without my being able to square it with my conscience. And then suddenly one spring there were orchids in my meadow. The nearest place where I know they thrive is a nature reserve some miles away, and the chances of there being any others surviving any nearer on my neighbours’ chemical farms were next to zero. Orchids hate nitrogenous fertilisers and fungicides and all that farmer stuff. They need soils where all the delicate interactions of roots and rhizomes and worms and dung beetles and microbes are intact, because although they are extraordinarily good at dispersing their seeds, they need very special places to germinate. Really special places now, places that were once as commonplace as fields. Were fields, in fact.
My orchard, it turned out, was one of those special places. It had not been sprayed or ‘fertilised’ and I had never used any chemicals. I refused to use tanalised posts, pumped full of poisons, and instead used proper split chestnut spiles if I needed a fence. All my sheds are built on stilts so that the spruce stays dry. That way it lasts for years, as any Swede will tell you, without preservative. I have a rooted aversion to putting poisonous chemicals on the land, and so the soil was full of life.
Orchid seeds are so small that they can travel on the wind like dust, and so should be widely distributed. They are partly so light because they are almost empty, carrying the germ-cells of life but none of the stored energy that makes up the bulk of a wheat grain, for example. They also have a very tough seed case out of which they cannot break unaided. They are extreme examples of plants that depend on the support of a fungus. In this case a fungus that can break down the seed case and then make available to the tiny germinating cells of the orchid all the nutrients they need. Because of the integrity of my soil and the complexity of the web of life in that soil, orchids were able to germinate with ease. Or by magic, if you prefer that way of looking at it.
The first orchid I came across, as a small boy, was the Spotted Orchid. I took it home and my father, who took an interest in that kind of thing, told me its Latin name was Orchis maculata and that it was the Spotted Orchid. He then took a pencil and put it gently into one of the florets, and when he pulled it out two minute pollen sacs were glued to the end of the pencil. If it had been a bee they would have glued themselves to her head as she probed the flower for nectar, and then been carried off to pollinate another orchid. I didn’t know then that Charles Darwin had first demonstrated this, maybe to his own children, whom he also employed in his research into bumble bees.
These Spotted Orchids have evolved to fit certain species of bumble bees on whom they depend for fertilisation, so that the pollen sacs are glued on to exactly the best place for them to fertilise the next flower. Another orchid has evolved flowers that mimic the rear end of the female of a particular bee species in appearance, texture and aroma, so accurately that it fools the male bee into attempting sex with the flower, getting a couple of packages of pollen stuck on its back in the process, which then fertilise the next orchid he visits with more satisfaction than he achieves. It is even theorised that his frustration drives him on in his search for other bee orchids and hence to more widespread pollination.
It would be easy to get side-tracked into the extraordinary sex lives of orchids, including how they have come to be seen in a sexual light by humans, which has aided their propagation in hothouses around the world. These strategies depend on the kinds of complex interactions with fungi and insects and so forth that are an integral part of healthy ecosystems.
The Large Blue butterfly, for example, evolved to depend not only on both the wild thyme leaves and flowers growing on anthills, but also on the ants being of a particular species who could be fooled into looking after their caterpillars. The loss of only one of these elements would have been enough for it to become extinct, as indeed happened in 1979, and complete habitats had to be restored before it could be reintroduced in 2019. The Adonis Blue butterfly also needs anthills, as well as Scabious nectar to feed the adults and the Horseshoe Vetch leaves to feed the caterpillars. The caterpillar searches for the ants and feeds them with a sugary secretion, and in return when it becomes a chrysalis the ants bury it, look after it and protect it from predators.
Nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find an anthill, but at one time complex ecosystems were everywhere and orchids and blue butterflies likewise. The simple lesson I take from this is that for the biosphere to thrive we should do nothing that damages these complex webs of interaction between species, especially when we don’t yet understand the half of it.* And of course this brings us, as you have probably been anticipating, right back round to farmers, who have got their grubby hands on almost all our biosphere, and certainly don’t understand the half of it. No surprises there then, except that rather than simply carping I suggest we need a movement to inspire farmers to combine the production of some food with a love and respect for the extraordinary, almost miraculous, complexities of nature. We need farmers who are as keen to have sticklebacks in their ponds and orchids in their fields as they are to have grain in the granary. I’m sure such farmers exist, somewhere, but there ain’t none of ‘em round ‘ere.
If you do wish to get side-tracked into the sex lives of orchids, have a look at a book called ‘Deceptive Beauties’ by Christian Ziegler (University of Chicago Press).
* This idea, the Precautionary Principle, is actually enshrined in EU law, and systematically disregarded. It has sometimes been invoked in litigation with bodies outside the EU. Note how I entered into the spirit of the thing there by using words like enshrined and invoked.
Just been reading that the tubers of the pyramid, butterfly and early purple orchids, which were known as dogstones , have a higher protein content than meat. Dried and powdered they made a restorative drink called salep . It was the introduction of cheap tea that replaced it and was the saving of them.