How to spot a good orchid obsessive from a very bad one

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I never did catch in flagrante the Duke of Edinburgh instructor who stole my one pyramidal orchid but I know it was him. He’d parked in my front drive to picnic, with his back wheel almost on top of it. I pointed this out and suggested he be careful. We chatted. Half an hour later man and orchid were gone. That’s obsessives for you.
So of course I have every sympathy this week with the dental surgeon who is keeping secret the location of the supposedly extinct ghost orchids he spotted in Herefordshire, after decades of painstaking search. He would not want to see them stomped by cameramen or, worse, “collected”.
Ghost orchids do not appear above ground every year. They take their long-term nourishment from the roots of other plants, parasitically, and only pop up occasionally to flower when conditions absolutely suit them. They are rare precisely because they are so picky about where they live and about when they stick up their relatively insignificant leafless little heads. They are the ultimate tease for an obsessive orchid spotter.
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At least the ghost orchid of the Florida swamps, Dendrophylax lindenii, so memorably described in Susan Orlean’s 1998 book The Orchid Thief, had glamour to it; if a flower can be both sexy and baroque, this is it. But the tiny, dull, British ghost orchid, Epipogium aphyllum, is most definitely for specialists only — a shrinking violet, you might say.
Still, obsessives love a challenge. Our ghost orchid man in Herefordshire is obviously a serious botanical spotter and conservationist combined who wants to protect his quarry. Call it trainspotting if you like, but it’s infinitely more difficult. And it’s productive: the orchid has been seen again at last.
However, there are other obsessives, collectors such as those who steal live osprey’s eggs and do actual harm to threatened populations, box-tickers with no respect for their quarry. So how do you tell a good orchid obsessive from a bad one?
Great Dixter in East Sussex is perhaps the nation’s favourite garden these days and when it was being established in the 1920s and 1930s, Christopher Lloyd and his mother would go digging up orchids, then commonplace, in the surrounding countryside to introduce to the flowering lawns. Those lawns today are a delight to millions and their drifting dust-like seed must form a seedbank for the depleted Sussex countryside roundabout. These days we’d say leave well alone, Mrs Lloyd. But those were different times, perhaps, and she made good use of her quarry.
But here’s the point: orchids rely on a close relationship with their surrounding soil not only to thrive but often to survive. Digging out a bare-rooted plant rarely works. It takes a clump of soil to thrive, something which at least my D of E man knew, and so did the Lloyds. Whereas the casual collectors, the smash-and-grab types, simply pull things up.
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While true bird experts can identify a bird new to them by its song alone (there’s a real collector for you), the true orchid obsessive has to see and photograph the plant in flower, not least because British terrestrial orchids are a tricky bunch to tell apart. Some, such as the early purple orchids, are common enough — you should see the prolific sites which the Monmouthshire Meadows Group are helping to manage — and others such as the ghost orchid are unbelievably hard to find.
The genuine obsessive is actually a box-ticker, the one who knows most orchids simply won’t grow in his particular garden because they are too picky, and so he is content only to spot them in the wild. The smash-and-grab obsessive, the dirty digger, is a problem for us all.
But for both kinds, it’s the sport that counts. When tropical orchid hunters go into the jungle their quarry can be an epiphyte growing 12m up in a tree, or the only chunks of orchid thrown down by monkeys might be unidentifiably flowerless, or the whole area totally inaccessible at the time of year when the plants are bearing seed. The frustrations of it! And yet after all those years hunting, who knows? Maybe, in the end, finding one’s quarry is almost a disappointment. What’s next? What’s next?