Note -All images on this page credit - Leif Bersweden. 1. Leif Bersweden 2. The Orchid Hunter front cover 3. Bee Orchid (Ophrys apifera) 4. Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii)





14th February 2018.





1. This is a question you probably are asked quite regularly, what made you become so interested in orchids?





It certainly is, but always a good place to start! I’ve been interested in plants since I was knee-high and could barely tell a daisy from a tree. It sounds cliché but it was only upon encountering my first orchid – a bee orchid – that the particular fascination with this group of plants took hold. I love how diverse they are (when you’ve got flowers that look like monkeys you know you’re onto something cool) and was particularly struck by the bee orchid, whose flowers look like little bees. It was this overlap between two worlds that had previously seemed so different to me that really grabbed my attention.





2. Your book, The Orchid Hunter: a young botanists search for happiness, is all about a trip you made throughout Great Britain and Ireland to see all 52 native types of Orchids growing wild. Can you tell us a bit about your adventure. Did you do it in stages, or all in one go? How did you plan the trip, what were the challenges along the way?





Yes, not your average gap year! So in a general sense the trip planned itself: there were 52 orchids to be found, the first of which begin to appear in April and the last flowers in September. The specifics were much harder to plan for, however. Each orchid flowers at a different point in the spring/summer and for different lengths of time. So while the common spotted orchid will appear in June and can often still be found in flower at the end of July, other rarer species might only flower for a few days. Because of this my summer was spent driving up and down the country, chasing each species as it came into flower. The greatest challenge was the weather: a long winter meant the first orchids weren’t in flower until May, putting all my carefully laid plans out of sync. This delay to the flowering season made it much more difficult to predict when species were going to appear, particularly when I was travelling to far-flung places like the Outer Hebrides to find some of them – I couldn’t always rely on other people to tell me when things were happening!





3. Can you tell us a bit about orchids of the British Isles and their conservation status? Which type of wild orchid is the rarest?





Despite having an aura of rarity, our native orchids are not all difficult to find. Some of them are actually very easy to discover and often grow abundantly; the common spotted orchid, for example, or broad-leaved helleborines. But as with any group of plants you do have some real rarities too. The rarest species in Britain is called the ghost orchid. It’s small and pale lilac-brown, growing in thick leaf litter in the woods of Herefordshire and Buckinghamshire. It has been reported to flower any time between April and October and the flower usually only lasts for three days – unless the slugs get it first. Living up to its name, the last two confirmed sightings of it came in 2009 and 1987. It hasn’t been seen here since then, and so for that reason I never included it on my list of species to find: had I done so I would have been setting myself up for almost guaranteed failure. Despite this, I spent hours and hours searching for it during that summer, in the hope of finding that bonus number 53…



