The southern marsh orchids, Dactylorhiza praetermissa, are almost knee high, with apple-green leaves, thick hollow stems and a spearhead of extraordinary purple-pink, cryptically lined flowers. They have suddenly and ceremoniously materialised in the abandoned field like ambassadors from another planet. Despite their indolence, everything about them – their form, colour, identity, presence, future – is mysterious. They stand among us, splendidly alien, as if they’ve entered consciousness from a terra incognita outside our everyday experience. These are not just flowers but an event with a magenta aura.
Only last week I wandered into this field, really just a fenced-off patch of limestone quarry spoil, to check on what might be flowering. In some years there are dense colonies of common spotted orchids and one year there were dozens of bee orchids, but the larger groups of orchid never last long and some years they are few and far between. I was beginning to think this year would be a poor show until I came across a couple of big southern marsh orchids, opening from places that had been really wet all winter.
Returning this afternoon was like gatecrashing an extraordinary garden party; the little field was awash with common spotted orchid, Dactylorhiza fuchsii, and there were masses of southern marsh orchids, many of which were in the early stages of flower opening like a slow-motion firework display. The sepals of the flowers sweep back like birds’ wings, while the lip is lasciviously curled back, unlike the northern marsh orchid, which is more diamond-shaped. Many of the flowers are magenta or cerise but some are paler pink and some of the leaves have blotchy spots, which may mean they’re hybrids with other marsh or spotted orchids. In the wet clayey earth the extraterrestrial root fingers conspire with secret fungi; as if they’ve been marking time for decades, this is their year of world domination. Everything about the southern marsh orchids is ambiguous, and there’s no guarantee they will be here in such numbers ever again. There are so few places where a phenomenon like this could happen now that it feels like the discovery of a new world bursting from the old one.
