The mysterious Ghost Orchid blooms in near darkness among rotting leaves on the forest floor. It blends into the background to the point of invisibility, yet glows, pale and ghostly. The ultimate grail of flower hunters, it has been spotted only once in the past twenty-five years. Its few flowers have a deathly pallor and are said to smell of over-ripe bananas.
Peter Marren has been a devoted flower finder all his life. While the Ghost Orchid offers the toughest challenge of any wild plant, there were fifty more British species he had yet to see. Among them was Diapensia, an alpine confined to a single steep Highland ridge; and the Holly-leaved Naiad, which inconveniently grows only in deep water. Peter set himself the goal of finding them all in a single summer. As it turned out, the wettest summer in years.
The quest took him from the dripping ancient woods of the New Forest to the storm-lashed cliffs of Sutherland. He paddled and swam in lakes, clambered up cliffs in mist and rain, and walked several hundred miles. It turned into another kind of journey: one into the heart of field botany in Britain – the dedication of plant recorders, and the never-ending enquiry into why plants grow where they do.
Partly about plants, partly autobiography, Chasing the Ghost is also a reminder that to engage with wild flowers, all we need to do is look around us and enjoy what we see.
Peter Marren is a writer and journalist on wildlife and countryside matters. He has also worked as an editor and publicist in a government nature conservation agency. His books included Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, Bugs Britannica (with Richard Mabey), The New Naturalists, which won the Society for the History of Natural History’s Thackray Medal, and Britain’s Rare Flowers, which won the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Presidents’ Prize. He also won a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for his work on Bugs Britannica.
ALSO BY PETER MARREN
The New Naturalists
Britain’s Rare Flowers
Bugs Britannica
Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies
The drawings of plants at the head of each chapter and section are from two main sources. The older are line drawings by Walter Hood Fitch (1817–1892) made for George Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora in 1863–5. These served the Handbook and field botany in general until well into the twentieth century. Most of the remainder are by Stella Ross-Craig of Kew, published as Drawings of British Plants between 1948 and 1973.
The drawing of Downy Rose in Chapter Two is a sketch by Keble Martin, which, as a full watercolour, occupied a prominent position on the dust jacket of The Concise British Flora. It is taken from Sketches for the Flora (1972) by W. Keble Martin, p.72. The drawing of Radnor Lily on p.33 appeared in Flora of Radnorshire by Ray Woods, reproduced by the author’s kind permission. That of Suffolk Lungwort on p.44 was specially commissioned for this book by Fred Rumsey. That of Interrupted Brome was drawn by C. E. Hubbard for his book Grasses (1954) and reproduced by permission of Penguin Books. The leaves and berries of Ley’s Whitebeam on p.98 were drawn by Tim Rich and reproduced by his kind permission. Proliferous Pink, on p.113, was drawn by James Sowerby for Smith’s English Botany in 1801 and is in the public domain. Leafless Hawk’s-beard on p.147 is from a coloured drawing by Jacob Sturm in Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen (1776), also in the public domain. Estuarine Sedge on p.199 is from The BSBI Handbook, Sedges of the British Isles, with the permission of BSBI.
To David and Anita Pearman
The ghostly flower blooms in near darkness among the rotting leaves on the forest floor. It has not so much as a speck of healthy, life-giving green. The stem is a greasy tube the colour of dead skin. The few, nodding flowers have a deathly pallor. They ‘droop and dither’ between pink and yellow. Some say they blacken at the touch. Sometimes a slug has been found on the half-eaten stem. Few of us have been lucky enough to find this strange plant in Britain. ‘The usual experience1 of ghost-hunters,’ noted one rueful searcher, ‘is that there is nothing there.’ On the rare occasion when there is, for a moment you don’t quite see it – just a pale wisp, a phantom of a flower, barely visible above the blanket of decaying leaves. Then you look closer and it snaps into focus, something pale and spidery, about three inches tall, with outsize flowers on a leafless stalk. The flowers seem diseased or dying, even when they are in full freshness and vigour. They have the beauty of a lovely corpse.
Its full name is the Ghost Orchid, Epipogium aphyllum. It has also been called the Spurred Coralroot, the Spur-lipped Coralroot, or, with less imagination, the Leafless Epipogium. It was named the Ghost not so much for its physical appearance as for its ability to blend into its background to the point of near invisibility: a ghost in camouflage. That name was coined by the botanist David McClintock after he was taken to see the plant in 1953 and could still hardly see it until his nose was inches away from the drooping flowers.
The Ghost Orchid lacks chlorophyll, the green pigment that enables plants to manufacture their food by photosynthesis. Instead it feeds insidiously on fungi locked inside its swollen, coral-like ‘root’. The science writer Richard Fortey, who lives near one of its former sites, dubbed the plant a ‘parasitic piggyback’2. The orchid captures the fungus and then proceeds to digest it, as needed. Until recently the plant was assumed to be a saprophyte, a species that feeds on decaying matter. But when its physiology was investigated there was a surprise. It is the fungus that manufactures food from decaying leaves, while the orchid has turned the tables on its erstwhile fungal ‘partner’ in a kind of biological double-cross. Rather appropriately, its favourite food is said to be the mycelium (the mass of thread-like filaments in the soil or attached to tree roots that make up the body of the fungus) of poisonous toadstools of the genus Inocybe.
The Ghost sits at one corner of a ménage à trois between orchid, fungus and the roots of a beech tree. The imprisoned fungi, which are themselves growing with the help of trees, tap the beech roots for sugar and water and offer in exchange foodstuffs such as phosphates that are essential for the growth of a healthy tree. Trees and fungi commonly work in such a partnership, but in the Ghost Orchid’s case, this partnership has morphed into slavery and then predation. Like a spider that consumes its mate, the orchid has taken full and unsentimental advantage of an evolutionary opportunity. It takes food from the fungus, and then turns the fungus into food.
So, with a belly full of macerated mushroom, the Ghost has no need of leaves. It doesn’t need proper roots, either, for its ‘coral root’ is technically an underground stem with tuberous pseudo-roots. For most of the time it gets along without flowers, either. On the rare occasions when they are produced, the flowers are as bizarre as you might expect. The Ghost’s scientific name, Epipogium, means ‘over-beard’ or ‘upside-down beard’ (aphyllum means ‘no-leaves’). The ‘beard’ in question is the main petal, shaped like Darwin’s generous face-hair, except that it sticks upwards by means of a twist in the flower’s ovary (and that’s another thing it doesn’t have: what appears to be a flower stalk is in fact the ovary, the bit that swells after flowering into a capsule for the seeds within). It is this big petal that provides the Ghost’s only definite colour, a spotty, washed-out pink. The rest of the flower, and indeed the whole plant, is cast in shades of sickly greyish-yellow.
The flowers look a little like rose-bodied spiders, perhaps dead ones, for they dangle flaccid and motionless from their hollow stem. They have a faint scent, some say of vanilla or fermenting bananas; but others have sniffed only mould and decay. Perhaps the Ghost smells of vanilla when the flowers are fresh and turns musky later on. In Britain, at least, these flowers seem to be a pointless luxury. Although they attract flies and bees in search of pollen and nectar, no ripe seed capsules have ever been found. Presumably cross-pollination seldom – if ever – takes place, simply because there are never enough flowers in bloom at any moment. Some flowers get devoured by slugs (or picked by botanists) before they get a chance to seed. So, in addition to managing without roots or leaves, and for most of the time without flowers either, it seems that the British Ghost has to manage even without fertile seed. Instead, among its swollen coral ‘root’, it produces little bulbils that push out more underground stems. These can be quite long; in the Ghost’s best-known site they seem to have burrowed right under the road. Hence, if you are ever lucky enough to find a group of Ghost flowers, they probably all belong to the same network of underground stems, and hence to the same genetic plant.
It is possible, even likely, that there are more Ghosts out there than we know of, lurking among the leaf-mould, flowering so rarely and quietly that they defy detection. But the absence of flowers, or ripe seed, brings heavy penalties. It means that the Ghost cannot colonise new sites, but can only perpetuate itself in old ones. If a disaster afflicts its home ground, it cannot return. It seems predestined to decline. And disaster has indeed overtaken many of its former sites, through gale damage, felling and replanting, the rutting and churning of heavy vehicles, and even the trampling feet of its human admirers. The number of places where the Ghost could reappear is getting smaller all the time.
The plant shown to David McClintock was the first to be found in more than twenty years. Some thought the Ghost had departed the scene and was in fact extinct, but others imagined it had merely gone to ground – quite literally so – living on out of sight, below the carpets of leaf-mulch, with worms and fungus for company. It was finally rediscovered by Rex Graham (1915– 58), an amateur botanist and dedicated Ghost-hunter, who had spent years searching for the plant in some of the shadiest woods in southern England. One July day in 1953 he was tramping the ground in a wood near Henley – a place hardly different from hundreds of other beechwoods in the Chilterns – and rested on a tree stump to light his pipe. And just then, over the bowl of the pipe, he spotted something: a pale flower poking up like a periscope from the ocean of brown leaves. ‘To be honest,’3 he told David McClintock, ‘I was ready to give up, and the feeling when I saw it was of relief more than anything. It was [only] the following day that I felt euphoria.’ It was just luck, he told another friend. A subsequent, very thorough search of the wood revealed no fewer than twenty-five flowering Ghosts belonging to what were thought to be twenty-three individual plants. Never before, or since, have so many been found all at once. Moreover, at least one vigorous plant continued to produce flowers almost annually, always in late summer, for more than thirty years, right up to 1986.
In most of its other sites, the Ghost has been more fickle. It comes and goes, spookily, and no one knows where or when it will appear next, or indeed if it will appear at all. It was found for the first time in 1854 on the bank of Sapey Brook near Tedstone Delamere on the then-border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Its discoverer dug it up for her garden, where the plant promptly expired (and I hope the Ghost’s ghost haunted her garden and mildewed her roses). It was not seen again until 1876, and then in a different place: Ringwood Chase, sometimes called Bringewood Chase, in Shropshire, where, once again, it appeared and then disappeared. A third appearance – one is tempted to call it an apparition – was near Ross-on-Wye in 1910, and it was the last for a long while.
Then, in the 1920s, word got around that the Ghost had begun to haunt a new area, the beechwoods near Henley. It was first found by Eileen Holly, a local schoolgirl, and had evidently flowered there for a year or two, for a botanist who managed to track her down noticed the sickly bloom among flowers in a vase on her windowsill. More years went by, until 1931 when Vera Paul found another Ghost, also in the Henley area and not far from her cottage. This one was unusually tall – a foot high, peering from the hollow of a rotting stump. It was photographed in situ, perhaps for the first time; and it was that hand-coloured image by Robert Atkinson that was reproduced in the orchid-hunter’s Bible, Wild Orchids of Britain by V. S. Summerhayes. All previous Ghost portraits were drawings and paintings made from picked or pressed plants. Vera Paul’s plant flowered, on and off, over the next thirty years.
A local resident, Joanna Cary, recalled years later how, as a child, she had been frightened by the sight of ‘funny men in gaiters’4 rummaging around in the wood by her cottage. She thought they might have been flashers, or criminals intent on burying something. But it was only Victor Summerhayes and his band of Ghost-hunters, out on their annual, always unsuccessful attempt to track down another specimen.
And that was the tally of Ghosts, until the moment when Rex Graham lit his pipe. Many people visited his site between 1953 and 1986. On one remarkable occasion a plant was found growing out of a mattress abandoned in a ditch by the road. I have been to the spot several times, but always found a very Ghost-free wood. The site was easy enough to locate, by the side of a wooded lane where it was bordered by a steep bank. On my first visit, someone had banged a post into the ground to mark the spot and, to make doubly sure, had placed a brick next to it. Fortunately my trips there were never wasted, for this used to be a marvellous place for woodland flowers, including Violet, Narrow-lipped and Broad-leaved Helleborine, and the plant that most nearly resembles a Ghost, the Yellow Bird’s-nest, another species that lacks any green coloration. But my Ghost-hunts were always failures. I would lie among the damp leaves, flashing a torch this way and that – for I’d been told the Ghost shines white, when struck by a beam of light. One time I found a little tepee made of twigs and suspected there had once been a Ghost inside that makeshift cage. Another time I found a dead, brown stem close to that wooden Ghost post, possibly the husk of a previous Ghost, but just as likely the remains of a Yellow Bird’s-nest. I wonder now why I did not excavate the earth around the stem as far as the root, which might have confirmed its identity. That is what the prolific botanical diarist Eleanor Vachell did in 1926, after being shown the exact spot where the schoolgirl had picked her Ghost flower. She and a companion had ‘crept stealthily’5 to the place and, ‘kneeling down carefully, with [our] fingers removed a little soil, exposing the stem of the orchid, to which were attached tiny tuberous rootlets’. They replaced the earth reverently, covering the tiny hole with ‘twigs and leaf-mould, and fled home triumphant’.
The last time I visited that wood I was shocked at the change. Until 1987 the Ghosts had bloomed beneath smooth, soaring beech trunks whose branches met eighty feet above your head, like the nave of a cathedral. Light filtered down in greenish shafts, dappling and pooling on the floor far below. But those majestic trees were hit hard by the great gale of October 1987. Down they crashed, pulling up great saucers of chalk and clay in their mighty roots. And, after that, the ground was further rutted and furrowed and scraped by work teams and timber lorries. Sunlight poured down through great ragged holes in the canopy. Thickets of bramble sprang up and the special, sepulchral atmosphere of the place was lost. It now looked like what it was: a wood shattered by wind, ground up by heavy vehicles and, lately, chewed up by increasing numbers of deer. Few orchids get the chance to flower now, much less set seed. Before they can, the deer bite their heads off.
The year 1987 was, in fact, the last British record of the Ghost for more than twenty years – or, at least, the last authenticated sighting. The previous year nearly a thousand botanical pilgrims had gone there to see just a single plant: a small Ghost with two flowers, one of the most-photographed flowers ever. What had been a fairly well-kept secret had been blown apart by a birders’ hotline offering exact particulars. Since then, it has been a case of finders-keepers. If Ghosts still linger among the archipelago of beechwoods in the southern Chilterns, no one is saying so.
I wanted very badly to see a Ghost. But if the plant had indeed gone for ever, it meant I could at least cross it off my list of plants-to-see. For I was planning a project I’d been waiting half a lifetime to fulfil: a grand tour of Britain to see every native wild plant, including all those that had eluded me over forty years of plant-hunting. For the first time I had the leisure and enough money to spend much of the summer chasing wild flowers. We have a lot of wild flowers – around 1,500 species, if you include ferns and their allies (the exact figure depends on how you define ‘native’ and how you define ‘wild’). There are five native flowers for every breeding bird, twenty for every species of butterfly and thirty for every kind of wild mammal. It is often said that our island flora is impoverished compared with that of our continental neighbours, but even so not many people have seen all our plants. You would need a lifetime to find them all. We have, for instance, around fifty orchids, one hundred ferns and fern-allies, fifty sedges, twenty-four rushes, twenty speedwells, twenty-two pondweeds, nineteen bedstraws, even a dozen buttercups. There is a lot of plant diversity packed into Britain.
Why did I want to see them all? Mainly because I love wild plants and wanted to meet them all in the flesh, in the beauty of their natural settings. The journey would, I realised, be a long one, but it would offer adventure and companionship in corners of Britain that still, miraculously, retain their wild beauty and natural diversity. It would, I reckoned, be possible to do it in a year, if I restricted myself to plants I hadn’t yet seen. There was, of course, a train-spotting element to this, a nerdish desire for completion. And a very good – in fact overwhelming – chance that I would fail. If so, I knew who to blame. It was all the fault of a dead Devon vicar called William Keble Martin.
On my fifteenth birthday I was given a copy of the publishing sensation of the year: W. Keble Martin’s The Concise British Flora. I cannot remember whether I had asked for it or whether it was my parents’ idea. I wasn’t especially interested in wild flowers just then. My thing was butterflies and moths. But there it was, already in its fourth impression, and it changed my life.
I was roughly the 100,000th person to own a ‘Keble Martin’. By 1980 another million-and-a-half people had joined me. The reason so many of us bought it was that this was a different kind of field guide to any that had gone before. It was the first book printed for a mass market that illustrated nearly every species of wild flower accurately, in colour, and at more or less life-size (trees were represented by leaves and twigs). The flowers were carefully arranged on each plate, often overlapping, in a way that was uncannily lifelike. Pale flowers were shown against green foliage, as in a hedgerow. ‘The draughtsman’s aim,’1 explained the author in his old-fashioned way, ‘has been to show an average fragment [of a plant], with its essential features, and to give each a place in the sun without crowding.’ In their exquisite detail Martin’s drawings resembled the past masters of flower illustration, but, unlike theirs, his pictures were available to all at thirty-five bob, or £1.75. The Concise British Flora was a labour of love that had taken this dutiful and preoccupied vicar the best part of his lifetime to complete.
I used Keble Martin to tick off wild flowers as I found them – to me, it was a good way of learning them. Fifty years on, my tattered copy is annotated with dates and places in much the same way as Martin himself had labelled his sketches. Beginning with Plate 1, Meadow Rues and Anemones, I see that I ticked my first Alpine Meadow Rue on Ben Lawers in the Scottish Highlands during a family holiday in July 1969. The most luscious flower on the plate, Pasqueflower, had to wait until a spring walk on Aston Upthorpe Down, Oxfordshire, in 1985. And I didn’t see the now nearly-extinct Pheasant’s Eye, whose intense red flowers lent it its old name of ‘red Morocco’, until July 2012, in a ‘cornfield near Dunsden, Oxon’. Ticking became a habit. Many of Keble’s 100 plates now have a near-complete set of ticks. But, especially towards the back of the book, among the grasses, sedges and rushes, there were many gaps. I used to brood over those gaps. Not all the missing plants were rare. Some were species I might have walked straight past, unrecognised – there were plenty of those among such lookalike groups as chickweeds, eyebrights and forget-me-nots.
When I found a new flower I would check its likeness on the page and then double-check it against Keble Martin’s terse text notes opposite. When I first opened Keble I hardly knew a daisy from a dandelion. With his help, I was soon able to sort out buttercups, umbellifers (they look tricky, but are in fact quite easy) and eventually even those problematic lookalikes, the ‘yellow composites’. I graduated to plants without colourful flowers, to sedges, pondweeds and even grasses – which, since they are all shades of green, Keble had left as uncoloured drawings. As I delved deeper into the world of plants. I learned that nearly every species has its own ‘look’, a kind of botanical personality – its ‘jizz’, as they used to say. In the process I learned the names of parts, like ‘umbel’, ‘sepal’ and ‘cyme’; understood that an ‘arcuate’ stem is one bent like a bow, and that a ‘lanceolate’ leaf is one shaped like a spear-point. Botanical jargon might seem arcane and unnecessary, but it enables a plant to be described precisely, stripped down to its component parts for the purposes of identification. With the help of such words, I learned to tell the difference between very similar-looking plants, not just from the details of the flowers, but also their leaves (are they ‘lanceolate’ or ‘cordate’?), their seed-heads or their sepals (are they hairy or are they reflexed?). Botanical terms aren’t difficult to learn, and they enable you to use the keys in a field guide or flora. Without them, a buttercup will probably always remain a buttercup, and not a Creeping one, or a Bulbous one, or a Small-flowered one. Your delight in buttercups will remain generalised, and not specific.
Why, in general, aren’t more of us interested in wild flowers? After all, they are all around us, even in a city, and their colours make a powerful, if easily underrated, contribution to the beauty of the landscape. They have wonderful names and intriguing back-stories and, unlike garden flowers, they don’t cost anything (seeing beauty in a weed can change your life – and the way you garden). We should love and cherish them more, and in Keble Martin’s boyhood, a century ago, people did. Wild flowers have retreated in the public consciousness since then. At least a million of us are sufficiently interested in birds to take out a subscription to the RSPB. But the equivalent charity, Plantlife, has to struggle along with just 1 per cent of that number.
This made the rapid ascent to best-seller status of The Concise British Flora all the more surprising. Who was he, this man who, accidentally, almost unintentionally, created a surge in wild-flower awareness? By the time his book appeared, he was nearing the end of a long and busy life. William Keble Martin was born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1877, the son of the rector of Staverton in Devon. He was a comfortable member of the educated upper-middle-class, a scion of a large West Country family with connections to Winchester College and the patriarchal home at Overbury Park in Gloucestershire. Among his siblings and cousins were vicars and deans, naval captains and engineers, schoolmasters and architects. A boyhood spent in rural surroundings in Devon and Wiltshire nurtured his love of the outdoors. The young Keble spent his holidays walking and camping on the moors, bird-nesting in the hedgerows and pressing plants in a book. He learned to shoot, and to ice-skate, not on a rink but on a frozen pond near the house. More unusually, he was interested in mosses. He collected and reared butterflies and moths and, indeed, it was ‘the desire to know2 their foodplants’, he explained, ‘that first promoted the effort to identify the plants required’. At Oxford University he read an unconventional mixture of Greek philosophy and botany. But there was never any doubt about his vocation, and it wasn’t botany. Naturally religious, with an evangelical bent, Keble Martin was ordained, like his father, and spent the rest of his life in the service of the Church of England.
He was that now near-vanished species, a naturalist who was interested in everything, or (as he put it) in ‘all branches of natural history’. While at Oxford he learned to draw flowers mainly because ‘fellow students complained of the difficulty of identifying them from the long, wordy descriptions in works then available’. In 1899, aged twenty-one, he made the very first drawing for what would become The Concise British Flora: a snowdrop highlighted against a leaf of ivy – the only drawing in the book to bring in a fragment of a different plant.
In those days, when photography was still cumbersome and monochrome, painting wild flowers was a popular hobby. One way of learning them was to ‘paint in your Bentham’ – the standard handbook of the day, by George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker, which included a set of drawings printed on strong paper suitable for watercolours. These drawings, by William Hood Fitch, set a lasting example to Keble Martin by always including the date and locality where the plant had been gathered.
In the 1920s a Wildflower Society was formed, of which Keble Martin was a keen member. It encouraged its members not only to draw and paint flowers, but to keep a diary of all the species they found. After reaching a certain level of proficiency, members could be promoted to the Society’s higher echelon, which was called, with romantic whimsy, ‘Valhalla’, and then, beyond that, to ‘Parnassus’, the Garden of the Gods. The select few who grazed the verdant lawns of Parnassus would be expected to have coloured in most of their Benthams. They now dwelled in the airy spaces reserved for those of uncommon attainment.
Keble Martin, funnily enough, would not have qualified for Parnassus, and perhaps not even for Valhalla. Forever busy with parochial matters, he never learned to drive and had a large family to support. He went botanising only where he could and when he could find the time. Many of the scarcer plants he painted were brought to him by friends, or even resuscitated from dried, pressed specimens. Perhaps the first rare flower he ever painted was the Heath Lobelia, Lobelia urens on his Plate 54, which he discovered at a ‘strong new locality’ at Yarner Wood in Devon, and first drew for the Journal of Botany in 1901. Earlier that year he had also painted Mossy Saxifrage, ‘a mass of flower3 like a white tablecloth’, which he had come across during a walking holiday in the Brecon Beacons. While serving as curate at Ashbourne in the Peak District a few years later, he spotted the rare Jacob’s Ladder on the steep bank of Bentley Brook, and took a sprig for painting later, ‘my fiancée4 holding me by an ankle to prevent my falling’.
By 1906 he had conceived his ambition to paint the entire British flora, including that of Ireland and the Channel Islands. At that time it consisted of around 1,400 native or well-established species. His principal guide was the London Catalogue of British Plants, which was marked off into 100 sections, each with about fifteen plants. ‘This method,’5 he noted, ‘led almost unawares to the plotting of the 100 plates of the Concise British Flora.’ Perhaps for reasons of space, he decided against including ferns and their allies in the project. His flora would consist entirely of flowering plants, except for a single plate showing the three native conifers: Scots pine, yew and juniper. His modus operandi was to place a drawing in the corner of each plate and fill the rest of the space with related species as he found them. This required many rethinks, as he worked over and over to fit drawings on the same plate without overcrowding. For some species, fruits, as well as flowers, had to be drawn; and, for difficult groups, magnifications of other diagnostic features: florets, capsules, stamens. Each drawing had to include everything necessary to identify the plant. And they would all have to be done at approximately life-size – which meant, of course, that in many cases the whole plant could not be shown, only a representative sprig of blossom or catkins. A pair of acorns and a leaf were sufficient for the Pedunculate Oak.
By 1932, by which time he was fifty-four, married and with four grown-up children, Keble Martin had completed about half of ‘the 1,480 figures proposed’. Some he needed to replace because the original paper had discoloured. Always a perfectionist, he repainted many more after discovering a superior grade of green paint. Some of the more elusive flowers were painted on ‘little holidays’, such as his family’s excursion to The Lizard in 1923, to Berry Head in 1924, to Upper Teesdale in 1927 and to Ben Lawers in 1933. It was at the last named that Martin famously ‘walked miles6 in mountain mist and rain to restore a small rare plant to its own niche’; the plant was Drooping Saxifrage, Saxifraga cernua, which at that time was known only from Ben Lawers. For his plate of lookalike fumitories (Plate 6, one of his best), he was able to enlist the services of the acknowledged authority, H. W. Pugsley – himself no mean botanical artist – and tour Cornwall in Pugsley’s car. More usually Martin travelled by rail or on his ‘lightless auto-bike’. For those plants that still remained out of reach, he relied on friends. Over five decades, eighty-two botanists sent him 360 specimens, a tribute to the generosity and fellowship that still lives on in botanical circles.
Keble Martin retired in 1949, aged seventy-two, moving to a bungalow near Chagford on the edge of Dartmoor – always his favourite corner of Britain. With increased leisure, but now in intermittent ill-health, he repainted or rearranged many of the older pictures whilst slotting in the last remaining plants as he found them, including Common Spike-rush, Eleocharis palustris, which he picked on a walk in Dovedale in 1952. The very last plate to be completed was the one chosen for the book’s jacket: an arrangement of wild roses ‘redrawn after kind criticism of N. Y. Sandwith’. The full set of plates was exhibited at the Royal Horticultural Society in 1958. Everyone who saw them agreed on their consistently outstanding quality. The Society’s President, Sir David Bowes-Lyon, headed an appeal for funds to get them published.
The publication of botanical art was then an expensive business. Gorgeous pictures printed by lithography in limited editions were affordable only by wealthy collectors or institution libraries. The mass-production of all-colour field guides was still in its infancy and, as far as wild flowers were concerned, the results had been decidedly unimpressive. The standard-setter was the Collins Field Guide to Wild Flowers by David McClintock and R. S. Fitter, first published in 1956. The text, with its Michelin star-system (great rarities such as Ghost Orchid merited three stars), was excellent, but the drawings were not much of an advance on Bentham and Hooker, and they were separated from the text, in a bank of plates. The only really good published pictures then available were the Drawings of British Plants by Stella Ross-Craig, but they were not coloured and were of more use to specialists working in a herbarium than to amateur botanists in the field. The only other recourse of enthusiastic amateurs was to wrestle with the scientific descriptions in the standard flora by A. R. Clapham, T. G. Tutin and E. F. Warburg; but, good as it was, it was not intended for beginners.
Martin’s work was offered to seven publishers, one after the other, and they all turned it down. The pictures would be impossible to reproduce, they said, at an affordable price to anything like the required standard; it was a pity, but it just couldn’t be done – sorry. Then the Duke of Edinburgh got to hear of it and asked to see them. He, too, was impressed, but another year went by until his equerry, David Checketts, decided to show them to George Rainbird, who was a pioneer of a new kind of publishing – book packaging. He specialised in illustrated books, often printed outside Britain, at presses where the quality of colour printing was high and the prices more reasonable. He also reduced costs by putting together large print-runs – getting publishers and book clubs all around the world to club together to achieve economies of scale. He is said to have taken one look at Keble Martin’s plates and exclaimed, ‘Every schoolboy will want one!’ With Rainbird’s know-how, allied to his absolute faith in the broad appeal of this book, the unit costs of production began to come down. This kind of illustrated book – a ‘coffee-table book’ in more recent parlance – was his forte; Rainbird had already made cheaply printed successes out of Beautiful Butterflies and Birds of Heath and Marshland, which had cost just twelve shillings each. Keble Martin’s more delicate work was more demanding. Rainbird had to put together a print-run of 25,000 copies to achieve a retail price of thirty-five shillings (the equivalent price today would be £27). Prince Philip helped things along by penning a foreword praising the ‘dedicated and painstaking skill which has gone into each plate’.
The Concise British Flora in Colour was published in May 1965 by Ebury Press, a subsidiary of the National Magazine Company owned by Michael Joseph (and now part of Random House). It sold out in four months. By the following Christmas the book had been reprinted four times. By 1980 one-and-a-half million copies had been sold all over the world. Despite the ponderous title (but, even so, a better one than Martin’s first thought, ‘Comparative Figures of British Flora’), it was the greatest success of George Rainbird’s long career.
By now a widower, Martin remarried in 1965 and presented his bride with all the original coloured drawings, the work of a lifetime. ‘What greater proof of my devotion could I give?’ he said.
The retiring and now retired vicar, aged eighty-eight, was suddenly famous. He was honoured with a science doctorate at Exeter University. Hatchards bookshop flung a party for their ‘author of the year’. He was invited to design a set of stamps for the Post Office. And he wrote an autobiography7, Over the Hills, described by Wilfred Blunt as a work ‘of quiet charm – the sort of book to be read at ease in a deck-chair in a garden full of Madonna lilies and delphiniums’. He died at home in Woodbury, Devon, on 26th November 1969, aged ninety-two and lies in the local churchyard.
The Concise British Flora isn’t perfect. Although the colour printing was remarkably good for its time, there was some loss of definition and a slight colour distortion, which grew worse as the book was reprinted. And, as the historian and naturalist David Allen has remarked, Martin’s taxonomy was ‘rather noticeably8 out of date’, and the short descriptions of the text ‘too meagre for comfort’. There were mistakes (the Lizard Orchid doesn’t flower in May), corrected in later editions, which added more naturalised species and widespread hybrids. But the drawings still stand up well to modern field guides. Keble Martin did not have room – and perhaps not the material, either – to reproduce every species. I totted up9 nearly 200 species described in the text that he was unable to illustrate, including eleven sedges, twenty-eight grasses, seven lady’s-mantles and, more surprisingly, seven orchids (including the Ghost Orchid). There are even a few species that he forgot to include, such as Norwegian Mugwort, Alpine Coltsfoot, Mat-grass Fescue, Hairy Lady’s-mantle, Alchemilla monticola, and Vigur’s Eyebright, Euphrasia vigursii.
Some of the drawings – and this is not really a criticism – are not an exact match for the living plant. Martin had made subtle changes to make identification easier. Take the orchids, where the spikes of flowers are looser than you usually find in the wild, so that the structure of each individual flower can be better appreciated. Many lanky plants were cut short to fit the space. And, of course, his trees and shrubs are minimal: his stand-in for sycamore is a simple double-winged seed; his alder, a mere catkin.
Modest to the last, Keble Martin would have been the first to acknowledge the book’s shortcomings. As he noted in the last line of his short, rather formal preface, ‘we hope that the plates may have a chance of speaking for themselves. The author is very conscious of their limitations.’
My original plan had been simple: I wanted to find and tick every plant in Keble Martin. But I soon realised that the task was impossible. As early as Plate 5, I found a plant that no longer exists wild in Britain, the Violet Horned-poppy, last seen in a Suffolk chicken-run sixty years ago. Martin included this and other vanished species because they were illustrated in the Victorian floras he grew up with: in Bentham and Hooker, and in the London Catalogue of British Plants. Contrariwise, there are other plants that Martin did not include because he did not know of their existence, including recent discoveries such as Radnor Lily and Suffolk Lungwort.
My new plan was to see all the native wild plants found in Britain, including ferns, but to ignore the ‘introductions’. I would also ignore ‘critical’ plants such as the brambles and hawkweeds, on the grounds that they are far too difficult and not proper species anyway (they are usually described as ‘micro-species’). I also decided to omit species found only in Ireland or the Channel Islands, on the grounds that they are not really British, but Irish or French respectively. Even so, this still left around 1,500 species, including those, like the common Field Poppy, that might not be strictly native but which had certainly been in the landscape for hundreds of years. Had anyone, I wondered, managed to see them all? A few luminaries of the past seem to have done so. George Claridge Druce (1850–1932) was probably one of them, for I had examined his herbarium, in Oxford, and found a sheet of an entrancingly dim little plant called Guernsey Centaury, Exaculum pusillum, on which Druce had written: ‘my last plant’. What satisfaction those words must have given him! David McClintock is also said to have seen every native plant. Richard Fitter, doyen of field guides written in the 1950s and 1960s, told me he had too, so long as you discount the hawkweeds and the more ephemeral garden escapes known as ‘casuals’. Perhaps there are today a few quiet, modest souls who have twitched the whole lot. If there are, I feel appropriately humble.
I got out my battered old copy of The Concise British Flora and counted the native plants without a tick. To my surprise, it came to a round number: exactly fifty. Fifty un-ticked species. How hard could it be to find all those in a year? Quite hard, on closer inspection. There were good reasons why I had never found those fifty. A few are plants that flower erratically, while others are found only in remote corners of Britain, and some bloom underwater. Finding them all would require a lot of travel. It might in some cases demand a degree of personal fitness. Well, I thought, I can swim and climb a bit, and still walk up a hill without collapsing in a wheezing heap. I hoped that would be sufficient. More problematic was that some of them flowered at the same time at opposite ends of Britain. Just how badly did I want to do this? Was it any more than a passing whim? Was it going to be worth the trouble, for that small inner satisfaction?
I made a table of flowering times and places, and began to work out a rough itinerary. I called it The Quest. But over the whole enterprise hung the spectre of Epipogium, the Ghost Orchid – a plant almost as unobtainable as the Holy Grail. Unless someone found it during the year, which, on recent form, seemed unlikely, it was a built-in guarantee of almost certain failure. Its non-availability haunted the whole project. It was impossible. But all the same, having thought about it, and imagining where The Quest would take me, I wanted to try.
Until now, I had never set out, systematically, to try and find every plant in the flora. Mostly, flowers, trees and ferns turned up in the course of walks, camping trips, ecological surveys and the like. The one family where I did once make an effort to locate and photograph every British species was the Orchidaceae, the wild orchids, in my gap year between school and university. I failed miserably, finding only two-thirds of them by the season’s end. Even now, there were two missing British orchids on my list, the Irish Lady’s-tresses and, of course, the Ghost.
The first county whose plants I got to know fairly well was Devon: a big county with a big flora and a fine range of plant habitats, ranging from the bogs and tors on Dartmoor to the limestone headlands of Tor Bay and the wilderness of sand at Braunton Burrows – not to mention the island of Lundy and its unique wild ‘cabbage’ – the subject of my first published paper. During my three years at Exeter University I was able to find most of Devon’s special plants, including the magnificent display of white rockroses at Berry Head, the intense blue stars of Blue Gromwell where the cliff had slumped into the sea near Axmouth, and the little, spring-flowering Sand-crocus on the golf links at Dawlish Warren – where, after having taken its picture, I was kicked out by a grumpy official.
Keble Martin assured his readers that botanists ‘take no risks’. We do, though. Sometimes we have to. When you have driven a hundred miles, and trudged another ten over moor and hill to find a cliff with your flower halfway up it, you are definitely going to climb that cliff. I’ve fallen off a few times. I’m probably lucky to be alive, after attempting to get within touching distance of Tufted Saxifrage. What seemed like a reasonable toehold gave way, and down I went, with flailing limbs in a spray of gravel, turf and rock. I was alone, and miles away from any help. Perhaps it was the malice of the flower’s guardian spirit, which had mistaken my purpose and thought I was about to pick her precious bloom. I fell off Ben Lawers, too, but that is a more comfortable mountain, with soft turf to ease the return of the plummeting botanist. Welsh Mudwort played a nasty trick on me once, when, eagerly peering into pools for its spiky rosette and dim little submerged flowers, I failed to notice that the rising tide was flooding the river, and that the mudwort and I were about to be stranded on a fast-diminishing patch of terra firma. Remarkably few botanists seem to have died for their hobby; at least not since 1861, when the plant collector William Williams was found at the bottom of a cliff with a tuft of Alpine Woodsia in the clutch of his stiffened fingers. For most of us, natural caution usually wins.
‘We commend botanising1 as a means of healthy recreation for young and old,’ continued Keble in his best, sermonising style; one that should ‘last to the end of our pilgrimage’. His own pilgrimage lasted nine decades, active to the end. Field botanists, I’ve noticed, often reach a great age; in fact the average