The Orchid Outlaw: On a Mission to Save Britain's Rarest Flowers

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Overlooking the Thames are some good examples of England’s ‘little men’ orchids: the jumbled candy-floss limbs of the monkey orchid, a few lady orchids, and a growing number of lady/monkey hybrids, unofficially known as ‘lonkeys’. Today managed by the National Trust, perched on the Cotswold escarpment, Minchinhampton Common’s grassland (once upon a time part of an Iron-Age Fort, a wooded landscape then partially quarried centuries ago) is a good place to look for Bee orchids rising from the grass like newly-polished velveteen gems.

The Orchid Outlaw - Wainwright Prize The Orchid Outlaw - Wainwright Prize

Then a chance encounter set him off on a journey of discovery into the wonderful, but often forgotten, world of Britain's fifty-one native species. Then he turned his kitchen into a laboratory, his fridge into storage for hundreds of baby plants and his back yard into an orchid refuge. Ever since, tropical orchids have overshadowed Britain’s native flowers, to the extent that many people today simply do not realise that we play host to more than 50 species. By doing so, these native flowers proved his theory of coevolution: the flowers would not look or operate that way without the presence of bumblebees. To them can be added the phenomenon of climate breakdown, which affects the emergence of pollinators, flowering periods, the setting of orchid seed and the suitability of certain habitats.More than that, while some people are monitoring them, in the name of conservation, nobody is succeeding in reversing the decline. University lecturer by day and clandestine ecologist by night, Ben Jacob lives with his family (and a small plantation of native orchids) at an undisclosed location deep in the West Country.

orchids in the Cotswolds | Great Precious and threatened: orchids in the Cotswolds | Great

These include the Bee which looks (and smells) so much like one that even bees are fooled, the Ghost which exists without sunlight, and Autumn Lady's Tresses which gave Darwin the proof he needed for his theory of evolution. Ben Jacobs starts his book with some very scary (and dangerous, and life-threatening) orchid encounters in tropical places. As I explore in my book, The Orchid Outlaw, in this respect our native orchids matter: they are not only biodiversity indicators, they tell a story about the planet, our place in it, and how to save it. He spends his life (and risks prison) tracking down rare orchids and rescuing them from unwitting destruction on the building sites and greenbelt developments of Britain.

Our two species of butterfly orchid — the increasingly rare lesser butterfly and commoner greater butterfly — have flowers like winged serpents sculpted by Dalí out of lemon meringue.