Hunting the elusive Bee orchid

Whilst doing the seed bomb workshop a couple of weeks ago I discovered a delightful fact – allegedly there are Bee Orchids growing on Tottenham Marshes about a mile and a half from my home, and they are due to start blooming right now. How could I resist such a lure? I’ve been neglecting the marshes lately, so I got on my bike and went to see what I could see.

What I saw, alas, was not Bee Orchids. It hardly mattered though, since I was out and about on the last glorious sunny day of this summer so far, and what I did find was rather wonderful in it’s own right.

Zooming down Coppermill Lane through a dense tunnel of rank vegetation, assaulted by the shrill voices of wrens and the scree of nestlings in every tall shrub I wondered why I don’t do this every day. When I got to the drainage ditches at Springfield marina the air was filled with zipping electric blue sparks of Enallagma Cyathigerum – the Common Blue Damselfly. I sat down beside the water and watched their nuptial dances, and was lucky enough to find these two in their extraordinary lovers embrace. If you view mating damselflies from the right angle their joined bodies make a perfect heart shape. Most bodies of water on a still sunny day will yield views of these lovely creatures right now in the UK, and they are well worth looking for. I also saw a glorious Libellula Depressa – or Broad-bodied Chaser, a male dragonfly with a body the colour of powdered and bottled summer skies. Naturally he teased me by flying from his territorial perch every time I got him into focus but I don’t go on these adventures just for photographic trophies and it’s just as well – I would have been deeply frustrated that day!

After half an hour of happy damselfly and tadpole watching I got back on the bike and rode along the River Lea navigation towpath. Shoals of small fish swarmed in the still water and mute swans fussed over their huge nests, and overhead swallows chattered. I was at Tottenham marshes at last.

It’s not much to look at, perhaps, to some people. A swathe of rank long vegetation sandwiched between a busy road, allotments and a canal and with pylons, gasometers, bus depots and factories looming at it’s edges, it’s not many peoples idea of a wildlife paradise. But it’s truly wild, and this liminal post industrial landscape is where the revolution starts, you mark my words. It’s places like these that are home to undiscovered beauty, the covert reclamation of land by all the other living things besides the human. Of course it’s managed to some extent, but the beauty of places like these is that things slip in under the radar – this kind of land is the sort that will suddenly sprout, unexpectedly, a beautiful flower from seeds or rhizomes that have slept in the earth for years.

The air was thick with the scent of elderflower and pollen tickled my eyes and dusted my feet. The voices of many warblers made one territorial claim after another, each responding to the last in a singing chain, a necklace of song. I wheeled the bike along and searched in vain through the long, tangled vegetation.

Was I sad that I didn’t find any Bee Orchids?  Not at all, not when so many other beautiful things crossed my path. The bee orchids got me out of the house and may have been my stated aim, but their coy refusal to show themselves led me to other secrets every bit as marvellous.

Wildflower stroll in Durlston Country Park

After the excitement of  “Meet a Moth” day, we set off for a walk in the meadows around Durlston Country Park.  This has to be one of the best places in the UK for spotting wildlife, a 280 acre countryside paradise consisting of sea-cliffs, coastal limestone downland, haymeadows, hedgerows and woodland. At this time of year it is glorious, stuffed with birds, rare and unusual plants, butterflies and if you are lucky there are dolphins, whales and basking sharks to be spotted out to sea.

N knew which fields are home to the rare Early Spider Orchid and had seen them on a previous walk, but sadly it was too late in the season and the flowers were all finished. This was barely a dissapointment given the beauty of the meadows, decked out in the brilliant deep blue of Chalk Milkwort and fat, hairy clusters of Kidney Vetch.

The day was hot, but a cool sea breeze and a bit of atmospheric haze kept us from shrivelling up as we walked along the clifftops, watching guillimots on their nests and Kittiwakes zooming about below us on stiff wings. This pair of herring gulls were disarmingly affectionate, displaying to each other within a few feet of us. At one point the male coughed up a nice bit of fish for his mate, but rather ungallantly changed his mind and ate it himself… charming!

On the cliffs nearby we found some Houndstongue, it’s deep red flowers only just beginning to open.

Working our way inland we came across white drifts of Sea Campion.

Into one of the meadows now, where we spotted this brilliant green beetle eating buttercup pollen. It’s name, Cryptocephalus aureolus, seems bigger than the insect its-self.

Crossing some cow pasture, the short fine turf revealed tiny, delicate flowers of Eyebright. Each is only a couple of millimetres across.

Eyebright wasn’t the only thing that the short, grazed turf revealed. As we scoured the meadow for any sign of Early Spider Orchids, an even rarer flower came to light. This tiny Early English Gentian studded the turf with lavender stars, and though my picture is out of focus I still wanted to share this lovely little flower.

We did find some orchids eventually, in a meadow shining yellow with tall waving buttercups and filled with birdsong. But that I will save for another post…

No such thing as waste ground

I went out to get photos of small tortoiseshell butterflies that I’ve been seeing about the place since the weather changed to summer. But today it was windy; no butterfly would sit for me, not even the normally obliging brown sort you see hanging around in long grass. Personally I was glad of the breeze, and I don’t need much excuse to go to Walthomstow and Hackney marshes.

Set against an uncompromising semi-industrial backdrop, the marshes are about as wild as any place in London. What many people might dismiss as “waste ground” is home to countless small wonders if you take the time to look, and has some fine blackberry picking if nothing else at all takes your fancy.

The first thing you notice on a blazing summer day like this one is the alien mechanical whirring of grasshoppers. The sound reaches out, as far as you can tell, to infinity and yet you will be lucky if you can spot even one. In spring the marshes are a bewildering cacophony of birdsong, but by the end of July all the birds are silenced by exhaustion and the end of the breeding season and the usual urban soundtrack of sirens, trains rattling across the many bridges, kids joyriding on scooters and low flying aircraft take over.

Cycling along the River Lea towpath, a huge sky rolls out before you – a rare and exhilarating treat in such a built up city. The marshes are filled with flowering reeds and among them, particularly at the edge of drainage ditches, Purple Loostrife wave their sumptuously coloured flower spikes.

Startlingly acid yellow ragwort flame up and jostle against wild carrot and vetch, and on a day like today it’s all moving, swaying, the reeds sussurating in every breeze. The ground is dead flat, and heat bounces up from the towpath as the grasshoppers sing their hot summer day song, but it’s near water too, so the heat is just this side of bearable. Ponds and ditches have shrunk to scummy nothingness but the calming green of the reeds show that there is plenty of water in the ground yet.

The flowers of late summer are at their finest, and the appetising tang of wild horseradish is in the air.

You think you’ve got the measure of the place when you ride into a sudden, intense aroma of honey as if you have ridden into a brick wall. The buddlea, or “butterfly bush” has you in its sensual embrace, with its nodding purple blooms, clouds of butterflies dancing attendance and that sensational perfume. These non-native shrubs have taken to our waste grounds like a rat to a drainpipe – and to remind me that I was indeed in the city, as I took this picture a large rat came scuttling out of the undergrowth. I was so startled I didn’t get its photo, but I think the buddlea is probably more attractive anyway.

Some would call the pylons ugly; I think that in this particular, utilitarian landscape they come into their own. As huge sculptural presences they give scale to the land and a welcome perch to daytime hunting little owls. We are too far away to see the owl on this particular pylon, but trust me – there is one there! I have never been close to a pylon on the marshes without seeing its resident little owl.

Trains clatter across the two bridges over the marsh with great regularity. A friend of mine once went skinny dipping in the nearby reservoirs and gave astonished commuters on the way to office jobs on the square mile a cheery wave, completely naked, as their train sped by. You never know what you might see, flora, fauna, human or otherwise on an afternoon visit. I leave you with a typical Walthomstow Marsh panorama – the marsh its self, a passing train, and in the distance a fire which had broken out on a nearby industrial estate. It may be a wild refuge in the city, but city it undoubtedly is.

No colour clashes in nature

I’ve never believed in the concept of clashing colours. In nature colours just pile up one on top of one another, riotous and random. A coral reef displays a screaming disregard for colour theory, and wildflower hedgerows in June throw together the most eye poppingly brilliant colour combinations. An overcast, thundery day can reveal brilliant unearthly greens, roiling clouds coloured in bruised shades  shot through with piercing veins of delicate rose pink, silver and gold.

Nature, of course, isn’t doing this deliberately. Heathen that I am, I know that there isn’t anybody out there selecting these fine colours for me to savour; it is all random, and much the better for it. Whenever I find a person who is timid with colour, I’ll always point them to nature and remind them that all you need is the courage to choose boldly and you will never go wrong.

However, in a hedgerow coming down from Woon Gumpus common last week I saw a colour combination so startling that for a moment it threw my pet theory into doubt. A brilliant crimson fuchsia, gone wild and living riotously in a dry stone wall surrounded by red campion and foxglove provided such a violent combination of colours that it was genuinely hard to look at. In the murky light of an overcast day the foliage glowed a deep and peculiar viridian, all the better to show up the screaming blooms.