Gentle adventure for dark evenings and armchair botanists about a young man’s desire to capture a summer of orchid flowers.
Reviewer Alys Fowler is a garden writer and horticulturist.
Our native flora is mostly a quiet, almost humble affair; there are intricacy and charms aplenty, once you delve into it, to fall in love with. But when you’re first starting out with botanising, it’s easy to see why people fall hard for the more flashy or flamboyant floras of the tropics, southern Africa or the Mediterranean or the heroics of high montane. However, there is a corner of our flora that is thrilling, feels exotic, clings to the rare habitats, is fleeting and carries all the chase needed for a summer fling. That is our native terrestrial orchids. Anyone who has ever sunk to their knees in damp grass to marvel at the perfection of a bee orchid or wonder at the delicacy of the Dactylorhiza knows of these joys.
Thus, the premise of this charming book is to take in as many of these orchids as possible in a single summer. There are 56 listed species, but some, such as the ghost orchid, are so elusive and sadly some, such as the summer’s lady tresses, extinct in the UK that Bersweden sensibly draws the line at 52 and then persuades his parents that running around the country courting these orchids is as sensible as going to some far-flung destination for his gap year.
Thus, begins this youthful tale of a summer of orchid love. Bersweden is everything you’d expect from a young man on the cusp of adulthood: enthusiastic impatient, competitive, naïve, joyful and delightfully nerdy. Through his eye the orchids flit, flirt and flourish, it’s a compelling journey, lovingly detailed, as fine an account as any.
In a world where botany undergraduates are no more, and our native habitats squeezed and stripped, this work of capturing a summer in such detail is not to be understated.