Burnt Orchids

Plantlife, the international plant conservation charity based here in Salisbury, wants us to adopt the Burnt Orchid as our Wiltshire County flower. I support them – and I hope you will too.

All life on earth depends on plants. They give us food, shelter, medicines and clean air. Most animals rely on them, too. Yet we are systematically destroying them. The recent Plantlife International report shows that, on average, each county in the UK is losing one species of wild plant every year.

It has been going on a long time. My three favourite books on Wiltshire are W.H.Hudson’s 1923 edition of “A Shepherd’s Life”, Ralph Whitlock’s 1988 “The Lost Village” and “The Wiltshire Flora” published by the Wiltshire Natural History Forum in 1993. Hudson lamented the arrival of cereal farming on Salisbury Plain in the nineteenth century. “The effect of breaking up the turf on the high downs is often disastrous; the thin soil which was preserved by the close, hard turf is blown or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by year, in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth cultivating”.

The Pitton lad, Ralph Whitlock, records the neglected countryside of the 1920s and 1930s. “On the impoverished downs nutrients were so scarce that coarse grasses and other vegetation had no chance of smothering the lowly but exquisite little downland flowers such as milkwort, fairy flax, wild thyme, squinancy-wort, rock-rose, bird’s foot trefoil, eyebright and harebell, as well as bee-orchids, fragrant orchids, pyramid orchids and burnt orchids”.

Plantlife launched its County Flowers campaign in 2002 and the people of Wiltshire have voted for the Burnt Orchid, orchis ustulata. This is one of our county’s treasures – a nationally scarce plant growing on short turf on unfragmented, unimproved chalk downland. It is short at 150mm, with dark purple buds, numerous small white flowers with red spots and with a strange, burnt-looking tip to the flower spike. Unlike other British orchids the rhizome grows annually, associated with a fungus, for 10 years or more before the first normal roots and green leaves appear. It produces tubers which resist drought and flowers in May, June and July. You will find it scattered across the Plain and on downland overlooking the Wylye Valley and the Ebble Valley.

In August our military takes a break from training, so it is a good month to visit sites that are rarely accessible such the Central Range Road on the Impact Area. There you will find a wealth of flowers and insects. The grassland will be full of tall plants like Greater Knapweed, Black Knapweed and Field Scabious and the smaller Clustered Bellflower and Autumn Gentian. Grazing or mowing will have encouraged little plants such as Bird’s-foot Trefoil and Wild Carrot – and you may find some of Ralph Whitlock’s favourites, too.

In our hectic lives it is good to pause, in August, and consider how political decisions impact on our natural heritage – and then to do something about it! I hope very much that Wiltshire County Council will support the Plantlife campaign. Bustards and orchids go well together. Please will you lobby your County Councillor?