I’ve a very nice orchid book complete with great photos and exhaustive detail on British and Irish orchids by Anne & Simon Harrap but some of the site guides are unreliable. So they have the Man orchid as occurring at Hartslock when it has ‘never been anywhere close’ (thanks for that Chris). Which is a shame because of course like all the anthropomorphic orchids (Military, Monkey, Lady/Man) it readily hybridises with close relatives. There is a proto joke in Fauna Brittanica about the ready hybridisation on the continent between Man and Monkey where they have been dubbed ‘missing link’ orchids. I prefer Orchidopithecus, Lucy Orchid, Piltdown orchid etc etc and in time-honoured fashion this peddler of bad puns is getting his coat !

Orchids are mysterious; being both rare and beautiful and it is easy to see why they can become the target of obsessive attention. That palimpsestuous oddity The Orchid Thief being a case study in the strange pathology that seems to get some human beings when they are confronted with the Orchid family. If you recall that the family name Orchidaceae is derived from the Greek word for testicles (orchis) which is what the tubers of some of the species look like you will note that there is plenty rich and strange about them. By way of example the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin, was apparently so shocked when he heard the derivation of the name that he proposed the alternative name ‘wreathworts’ . Ruskin’s ability to be shocked by natural phenomena was legendary, there is a rumour that the sight of his wife’s pubic hair on his wedding night shocked him into sexual abstinence. His predecessors were much more matter of fact about matters of the lower body. John Gerard the Sixteenth Century herbalist based his classification of the orchids on the resemblance of the tubers to mammalian testicles. In this he was following the Classical author Discorides whose classification he rejects as insufficiently complex.

‘Bicause there be many and sundrie other sorts differing one from another, Isee not how they may be contained under these two kinds only.Therfore I have thought good to devide them as follows… Dogs Stones, Fooles Stones, Gotes Stones, Serapias or Satyrion Stones, Swete Smelling Stones or Dwarffe Stones’.

So the Military Orchid is known as Soldiers Cullions.  The precise details of many of their life cycles are only just being unravelled.

There are 56 species of orchid in the British Isles and many of them are at the edge of their European ranges. The two species that I saw yesterday I identified as the Lady Orchid and the Monkey Orchid which are both members of the Genus Orchis. Photos here to show the ‘distinct’ differences between them.

I identified these as a Monkey Orchid on the left and a Lady Orchid on the right. I was wrong ! Thanks to Chris Raper, warden at Hartslock for confirming that the spike on the left is a hybrid of Lady & Monkey Orchid or Lonkey as they are known ! Here are two more photos of the two species.

The first is a Lonkey

The resemblance to a monkey is not exact especially as this is a hybrid with the lady which has much larger and wider ‘legs’.

Here is a Lady Orchid.

This is named for its resemblance to a human figure with bonnet and large skirt !The Lady Orchid at this site (which appeared only in 1998) have been identified as of European origin which suggests that they were introduced deliberately or arrived on the wind (the seeds are very light). The ‘pure’ Monkey Orchids at this site are not yet flowering but I will post a photograph to illustrate the difference.

There has been some anxiety that the hybrids are more vigorous than the smaller and less sturdy Monkey orchids and that they might crowd out the native population. Given the scarcity of the species which is only found at two other sites in the UK (both in Kent and one of which is an introduction)  such concerns are understandable, but would presumably lead to a kind of botanical cleansing of the ‘hybrid interloper’, not an attractive thought.   However Chris Raper has a more measured and optimistic view suggesting that ‘the three species grew all along the south Chilterns in the past with the Monkey orchid favouring the western end, Military favouring the eastern end and Lady scattered amongst them. They probably hybridised much more frequently and the resulting plants were harder to split into 3 distinct species. Far from being a problem, these hybrids might actually be returning the population to a more natural state where occasional mixing of genes between the species was normal’. (http://hartslock.org.uk/blog/?page_id=99).

Yesterday was a very wet day indeed at least in the Chilterns, with the Thames at full spate and almost continuous rain. So a near-perfect day for flower photography, if one has a fondness for mud and rain.

The rather portentous title for this blog alludes to a couple of books that I’m fond of and a region that I have spent too long being obsessed about. The books are A Quest of Flowers, a book about the Plant Hunters George Sherriff and Frank Ludlow and In Quest of Flowers  :A Journey in Northwestern Hupeh by Ernest Wilson. The region is Western China/Eastern Tibet, or as it was famously called by the doyen of all of the Plant Hunters, Frank Kingdon-Ward, ‘The Land of the Great Corrugations’. There may seem to be a tenuous connection between the one of the remoter regions of Asia and the Thames valley but the Goring gap, which is where these photographs were taken is the product of similar geological process to those that shaped the ‘river gorge’ country of south east Tibet. One of (the fascinating) difficulties with discussion of this is that the terms of reference don’t refer to what we  think they do as they postdate the emergence of the objects in question. So River Thames, North Sea and British Isles should be taken with a degree of caution here. With that proviso in mind one can say that The Thames (from the Celtic Tamesas) flowed until half a million years ago through the lowlands that would become Oxfordshire before turning Northeast to flow up through what would one day be East Anglia toward its outlet in what we now call the North Sea.Heavy glaciation around 450,00 years ago blocked the river course somewhere in present day Hertfordshire and with the buildup of glacial lakes caused the river to burst through the narrowest and softest part of the chalk hills that had previously enclosed it. Thus was the Goring Gap created and the course of the Thames that would be variously,  a tributary of the Rhine, a richly meandering course through Doggerland (the low lying landscape now occupied by the North Sea) , and one of the ‘dark places of the earth’ (as Conrad put it) before flowing into recorded history.

It’s an atmospheric and beautiful spot, particularly with the sheer weight of water and the range of wild flowers is astonishing.

I managed to locate the Pasque Flowers (thanks to the warden Chris for precise directions) but in driving rain so the photos don’t really do justice to what is a beautiful flower.

A solitary muntjac watched me from the bottom of the steep slope; the only reason that the rare flora here survived was that this until recently was too steep to plough. The current distribution of the Pasque Flower follows the contours of steep chalk grassland as the most up to date distribution map shows ; http://data.nbn.org.uk/gridMap/gridMap.jsp?allDs=1&srchSpKey=NHMSYS0000462153.

The real speciality of this site though are the orchids and they merit a blog post of their own.

The Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla Vulgaris) that I’d hoped to locate yesterday proved elusive and with heavy rain threatening and the van up to its hub caps in thick mud I drove home wondering whether I will ever see them in the wild. Rockeries in a garden centre don’t count. The flower is supposedly also known as Dane’s Blood in parts of what Edward Thomas called The South Country , due to its fondness for growing on sites associated with Viking battles. Folklore has it growing out of the blood of dead Vikings, although John Clare (Romantic poet and madman of several parishes) links it to even earlier invaders.

‘I could almost fancy that this blue anenonie sprang from the blood or dust of the romans for it haunts the roman bank in this neighbourhood & is found no were else it grows on the roman bank agen swordy well & did grow in great plenty but the plough that destroyer of wild flowers has rooted it out of its long inherited dwelling…’

It’s a rare plant as it needs undisturbed chalk grassland ( a very rare habitat indeed) and flowers at Easter as the name suggests. I shall try again next week  and try harder and fail better. In the meantime enjoy the cowslips.

This is a dominant male in one of the tourist zones in Kanha, nicknamed Muna by the guides after one of their colleagues.

Muna is probably the most photographed tiger in Kanha, particularly given the odd pattern of stripes on his forehead which are instantly recognisable. Detail here ;

Despite the obvious size and power of an adult male tiger (large enough to tackle Gaur Bulls and Sambar Stags, dominant males do appear to spend rather a lot of time patrolling their large territories (around 60% larger than female territories). Tigers are polygamous so each male can and will mate with several tigress whose territories overlap with his. In purely biological terms this makes the most use of his relatively short period of being fertile and of having access to receptive females. Hence tigers who control a larger home territory have more opportunities for mating and of passing their genes on. Females, once impregnated by the resident male are occupied with cubs for the next two years.

Males accordingly defend their territory in a variety of ways. Firstly there is extensive scent marking which acts as a warning and method of communication between tigers. I’ve seen but never photographed the curious grimace known as Flehmen where a tiger sticks out its tongue and draws back its lips to bare its teeth, which wafts the scent to an organ in the mouth (Jacobson’s Organ) that interprets the pheromones. These scent markers identify whether it was left by a female in oestrus, or a male rival or threat and the tiger will then respond accordingly. So a smaller male will probably avoid contact with the dominant male unless he is feeling particularly lucky or brave, or emboldened by a whiff of a fertile female. You may be imagining here a feline version of the British advertising campaign for Lynx bodyspray; documentary realism if you are a teenage boy and wry comedy for everyone else and you’d be about right.

Secondly, of course there is always the option of brute force and tiger fights are by all accounts extraordinary events and high on my list of things that I want to photograph. Typically in these fights between dominant males and interlopers the powerful forearms and paws are used. There are some terrific photographs in Valmik Thapar’s excellent book Tigers -My Life, which I managed to carry on as hand luggage on the flight back from India last week.

One of the younger males in Kanha that I photographed has what appear to be claw marks from a fight on the inside of his left forearm. I chatted to several guides and its hard to imagine what else these wounds could be. This is the male on his way to rest in a pool. The wounds are a reminder of the power of the beast.

I’ll leave the last word to Fayrer’s The Royal Tiger of Bengal, who points out that ‘Those who have seen the tiger when stripped of his skin, can hardly fail to have been struck with the grotesque resemblance to a gigantic human form which is presented by his sinewy and muscular frame as the arms are stretched out on either side. The vast shoulder, arm, forearm, wrist, and hand have a wonderfully anthropoid appearance’.

To which my immediate response is what is so wonderful about the apes, but that will have to be for another time !