The Orchid Outlaw: On a Mission to Save Britain's Rarest Flowers

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By now you are probably working out that Ben Jacobs is covering a lot of ground in this book. Law, science, and simple botany, plus habitat niceties, policy of local government officers and other groundkeepers… and did I say simple botany? Orchids are anything but simple. They are the most amazing, most complicated flowering plants you can imagine, and it turns out they even have their own mycorrhizal fungi they like to cohabit with ( like trees). Britain’s orchids are in decline — some are seeing a gradual slide towards extinction and others a recent population collapse. This is a consequence of a shift made about two centuries ago from millennia-old forms of land management to industrialisation. Over this period, clear-felling of ancient woodland, ploughing grasslands, draining marshes, urbanisation and the proliferation of chemicals in the earth, water and air have occurred on an unprecedented scale. Many of these factors have been enabled by feeble environmental legislation. Get political: write to your MP, make your views heard on social media, object to planning proposals on rare Cotswold grassland. Most of all, we can spread the word and encourage friends, family, and colleagues to do what needs to be done. As I explore in my book, The Orchid Outlaw, in this respect our native orchids matter: they are not only biodiversity indicators, they tell a story about the planet, our place in it, and how to save it. The story they reveal concerns us all. In the shady depths of beech forests, the otherworldly bird’s-nest (named after its scruffy, nest-like rhizomes) lives underground without sunlight, only sending its spikes of bone-coloured flowers into the daylight. Our two species of butterfly orchid — the increasingly rare lesser butterfly and commoner greater butterfly — have flowers like winged serpents sculpted by Dalí out of lemon meringue. They are pollinated by night-flying moths attracted to their lily-like scent and the ethereal glow they produce by moon and starlight. In contrast, the lizard orchid has been said to smell of goat and can have yard-high banners smothered in twisted petals like lizards’ tails. The endangered red helleborine (Cephalanthera rubra), one of Britain’s rarest plants. Credit: Getty

The Orchid Outlaw - Wainwright Prize The Orchid Outlaw - Wainwright Prize

The enchantingly beautiful native orchid is, tragically, one of Britain’s most endangered wildflowers, but it’s still possible to see them if you look in the right places, says Ben Jacob, author of The Orchid Outlaw.Frog, bird’s-nest, bee, fly, monkey, late spider, lizard — if you think these are ingredients for a potent Hallowe’en brew, think again: welcome to Britain’s fascinating array of wild orchids. Orchids are the most diverse, most highly evolved flowering plants on the planet. With more than 30,000 species (compared with 6,399 mammalian ones), the vast majority are native to tropical zones. It was these that wealthy Victorians feverishly imported at great cost from the jungles of Asia and the Americas. Ever since, tropical orchids have overshadowed Britain’s native flowers, to the extent that many people today simply do not realise that we play host to more than 50 species. Part memoir, part fascinating history of our most exotic and yet overlooked flower, this is nature writing with a real story. Ben shares with us his mission, and raises urgent questions about our environmental legislation. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Saving Britain’s orchids is about more than beauty in the wild; it is about protecting and preserving the rich tapestry of our natural heritage’ Jacob tells us many times that he is ‘saving’ Britain’s native orchid population (which consists of fifty-one species, many endangered) at considerable personal risk. The problem is that orchids are fussy in terms of habitat and die out easily. Many have difficulty propagating themselves (even Darwin was flummoxed as to why). It means that species such as the rare Monkey Orchid, whose flowers really do look like little monkeys, and the rarest of all, the aptly named Ghost Orchid (last seen in Britain in 2009), find themselves nearing extinction in the wild. You can’t buy wild orchids from nurseries and their low-key charms are in any case somewhat recherché – ‘quirky, surprising, unconventional’, as Jacob puts it. The orchid has always been a

orchids turned me into an outlaw Rescuing doomed orchids turned me into an outlaw

One of Britain’s first-flowering varieties is the early purple orchid (Orchis mascula), found in ancient woodlands and meadows. Today managed by the National Trust, perched on the Cotswold escarpment, Minchinhampton Common’s grassland (once upon a time part of an Iron-Age Fort, a wooded landscape then partially quarried centuries ago) is a good place to look for Bee orchids rising from the grass like newly-polished velveteen gems. Each of these little jewels is a flower designed to look, feel, and even smell like a female bee sitting among pink petals to attract amorous males to mate with it. This process, known as “pseudocopulation”, is intended to get the flower pollinated without it having to produce nectar. This is a fascinating book, with a huge amount of information, and lots of references plus further reading. It’s properly put together and on the whole made for good reading. But it does tend to leap about a bit, and I think the editor could have done a better job to help Jacobs make it flow. Despite that, I gave it four stars on Goodreads, which means that the content far outweighs its faults.These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. Unfortunately, not all the chalk grassland that once clothed the Cotswolds has been saved. Today’s short-sighted planning policy allows rare habitats to be destroyed to make way for housing and transport infrastructure. So, what can we do to preserve these areas and the rare flora and fauna which live there? Firstly, never underestimate the power of you. Despite politicians’ carefully scripted sound bites, for decades legislation and policy in this country has failed to adequately protect our nature. That is a story not exclusive to orchids and the Cotswolds: the native inhabitants of these islands are dwindling at an unsustainable rate. This should concern all of us, for biodiversity is part of the fabric which allows this planet, our economies, societies, and future generations, to function. Without policy-makers turning this into the priority it deserves to be, saving our island’s nature and our children’s future is down to us.

The Orchid Outlaw by Ben Jacob - Jemima Pett Book Review | The Orchid Outlaw by Ben Jacob - Jemima Pett

Ghost orchids (Epipogium aphyllum) have not been seen in the wild in Britain for 13 years. Credit: Alamy Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ As did all our flora, orchids evolved to inhabit ecosystems specific to these isles, such as ancient beech forests, bogs, heaths, woodland clearings, marshes and meadows. Humans have made these habitats fragmented and rare. One species of orchid, summer lady’s-tresses, went extinct in Britain in the 1950s. Another, Irish lady’s-tresses, died out in the 1990s. The gorgeous lady’s slipper, with its sun-yellow pouch and burgundy braids, clings on in the wild as a single plant.Ben Jacob leads a secret life as a clandestine ecologist. His first book, The Orchid Outlaw, blends memoir, cultural history, and nature writing to recount his illegal efforts to save England's orchids from destruction.

The Orchid Outlaw by Ben Jacob | Waterstones

Apart from a few concerned scientists, conservationists and enthusiasts, these disappearances receive little attention. For this reason, raising awareness of Britain’s orchids is more than about saving some beauty in the wild; it is about protecting and preserving the rich tapestry of our natural heritage for future generations. Reading and learning everything he could, Ben realised that Britain’s orchids are in desperate trouble. Some, such as Summer’s Lady Tresses, have gone extinct; others, such as the magnificently strange Ghost Orchid, have not been seen since 2009; all have experienced vertiginous declines. Changes in land use and climate are responsible, but so too are Britain’s outdated environmental and planning laws, which seem incapable of protecting rare species in the face of the drive to build new homes and infrastructure. Obsessed by orchids since childhood, Ben spent his twenties travelling to far-flung jungles to see them in the wild. Returning to the UK, he was entranced to discover our fifty-one native species and their exotic stories: the Bee whose flower looks (and smells) so much like one that even bees are fooled, the Ghost which exists without direct sunlight, and the Autumn Lady’s-tresses that helped Darwin work out his theory of evolution. Obsessed by orchids since childhood, Ben spent years travelling to far-flung jungles to see them in the wild. Then a chance encounter set him off on a journey of discovery into the wonderful, but often forgotten, world of Britain’s fifty-one native species. These include the Bee which looks (and smells) so much like one that even bees are fooled, the Ghost which exists without sunlight, and Autumn Lady’s Tresses which gave Darwin the proof he needed for his theory of evolution. The land at Cleeve Common has been left largely unchanged for centuries, and offers good opportunities for spotting orchids. (c) Getty Images

When summer segues into autumn, the last of Britain’s wild orchids, autumn lady’s-tresses, raises its little spires hung with pale, honey-scented bells and offers its nectar to incongruously large bumblebee pollinators. Charles Darwin studied the way bumblebees pollinated these flowers and how this orchid has a very clever mechanism for ensuring cross-pollination. By doing so, these native flowers proved his theory of coevolution: the flowers would not look or operate that way without the presence of bumblebees. Similarly, without their pollinators, orchids such as the early spider would not have evolved to look, feel and smell as they do. Obsessed by orchids since childhood, Ben spent years travelling to far-flung jungles to see them in the wild. Then a chance encounter set him off on a journey of discovery into the wonderful, but often forgotten, world of Britain's fifty-one native species. These include the Bee which looks (and smells) so much like one that even bees are fooled, the Ghost which exists without sunlight, and Autumn Lady's Tresses which gave Darwin the proof he needed for his theory of evolution. About 10 years ago I turned outlaw to save orchids. It happened after I found some white flowers spiralling out of the short turf of a roadside verge at the city’s edge. They belonged to a near-threatened species of wild orchid called Autumn Lady’s-tresses. Their blooms, quivering in the slipstream of passing vehicles, gave that day a shot of unexpected joy. After all, it’s not often you get to see rare flowers on an urban stroll. Distracted, I didn’t notice the nearby signs advertising a forthcoming housing development. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’