The two outer Lizard Orchid images of the above triptych were taken three weeks apart. I’d originally noticed a few similar plants thrusting upwards through the tangled vegetation of the roadside verges on my twice-weekly vegetable-buying cycle trips to the local market about five miles away. Taking a few “progress” photos every few days, not knowing what was going to finally appear, was the obvious thing to do and filled me with expectation!

Having adopted a regular recording routine, I actually missed the uncoiling of the head as it broke free and became the tangled flower stalk... and missed all those in the neighbour’s garden too. Perhaps it takes less than an hour, like the veins of a butterfly’s wings to fill with blood, for the display to unfold... but I know I have missed it for this year. However, knowing what to expect I will be more alert next year.

The individual Lizard Orchid flowers are fascinating to look at... drawings and photographs in guide books not really revealing the true beauty and delicacy of form. From a distance the tall flower stem could look like a solitary Rosebay Willow Herb going to seed... but I have a particular aversion to that plant as it carries a strong possibility of being the cause of my suffering with hay-fever... from which I have had a regular early-June bout for most years of the past fifty. However, on closer inspection the flower spike reveals many ornately patterned hoods from which flimsy, long individual tails or ribbons and a pair of shorter arms droop and twist away. Although the Lizard name is an obvious one to attach to this orchid, I can visualise another aquatic creature... bells and tentacles forming a shoal of jellyfish.

Although classified as rare and vulnerable in the UK - being included in the Wildlife and Countryside Act Schedule 8 - the numbers of Lizard Orchids have been increasing since the 1990s due, possibly, to climate change. The largest concentrations in the UK are found on golf courses which are the home to six, of sixteen, known colonies in southern England. It is thought that the seeds of this particular orchid attach easily to golfers shoes... and thus spread across the links as hitters of the small white ball search the undergrowth for lost ones.

Indeed, during the 2003 Open Championship at Royal St. George’s at Sandwich in Kent, when 150,000 spectators turned up for four days of golf, many areas had to be roped-off and marshalled because 90% of the UKs population of Lizard Orchids grow there. Over the past century numbers have varied enormously, between a maximum of 5,000 to a recorded low of only 300, which shows how fragile the native orchid environment can be.