A botanical garden

A friend in the next village is knowledgeable about plants and, quite fortuitously, has become the conservator of a host of green-winged orchids that emerge in her garden in late spring. Her self-appointed task is to count them each year and report the number to the county plant recorder. When I dropped in today she was not at home but the forest of carefully placed bamboo markers indicated that the colony is thriving.

This once-plentiful orchid has been hard hit by agricultural change and the loss of the old species-rich hay meadows which were never cultivated, and only grazed after the annual cut. It seems that my friend's house, which is not an old one, was built on just such a pasture and she was just the person to spot the significance of its flora, never mowing her 'lawn' until the flowers have set seed. The orchids grow alongside yellow rattle another marker of undisturbed grassland.

Anacamptis , formerly Orchis, morio takes its name from the Greek word for fool or jester, the green veins of the sepals supposedly resembling the jester's cap. There's a macro here which shows that very clearly. My own inset image is of one of the darker flower spikes - some are a paler pink.

Like all orchids this one has attracted some peculiar local names: hen's kames (combs), bull's bags, dog's dubbles, keet legs and deid man's thoombs in Scotland, and in England giddygander (Dorset), goose and goslings (Somerset), dandy-gosher (Wiltshire), parson's nose (Devon) and single castles (Isle of Portland). With the loss of the old meadows we lost a great deal of linguistic diversity too.

For all the kind people who sympathized over my encounter with the jaws of a dog a week ago I am happy to say that the wound is healing well and today was the first on which I was not aware of any discomfort while walking.