'EXTINCT' GHOST ORCHID APPEARS FROM THE GRAVE (via Paul Cropper)

'EXTINCT' GHOST ORCHID APPEARS FROM THE GRAVE
440 words
24 April 2010
The Press (Christchurch)
9
English
© 2010 Fairfax New Zealand Limited. All Rights Reserved.

It is the most mysterious wildflower in Britain, the strangest, the rarest, the hardest to see, and it was given up for lost. But like a wandering phantom, the ghost orchid has reappeared. The Independent newspaper reports that after an absence of 23 years, during which it was declared extinct, this pale, diminutive flower, the most enigmatic of all Britain's wild plants, rematerialised last autumn in an oak wood in Herefordshire.

Its sighting, initially kept a close secret, has electrified the British botanical community. This is British botany's holy grail, searched for annually and ardently by a small army of enthusiasts for more than two decades.
Its eventual rediscovery was due to the painstaking detective work of an amateur botanist, Mark Jannink, who identified 10 possible sites in the Welsh borders and visited them regularly throughout the summer, until on September 20 he found a single example of Epigogium aphyllum, bearing a single white flower on a white stem only five centimetres tall.

The plant was so unobtrusive that it was invisible from a few yards away.

There had been no previous ghost orchid sighting in Britain since a single plant was found in Buckinghamshire in 1986. It was declared extinct in Britain's Red Data List in 2005. Mr Jannink, 42, who runs a motorbike company in Worcestershire, has been a wildflower enthusiast since childhood. "To be honest, I was ready to give up, and the feeling when I saw it was of relief more than anything. It was the following day I felt the euphoria," he said.
The species is hard to find because it does not appear every year and behaves more like a fungus than a flower, according to naturalist Peter Marren author of Britain's Rare Flowers: "It has no green leaves. It doesn't depend on photosynthesis at all, and it doesn't manufacture its own food. Instead, the food is manufactured for it by a fungus on its roots. It lives largely underground; in fact it can live underground without flowering properly for years on end, and it only flowers when conditions are just right."

Mr Marren added that when it does bloom, the ghost orchid flowers in the thick leaf-mould in the darkest parts of the woodland, where there is no other vegetation. "It's the hardest British flower to see. It looks extraordinary. It produces these flowers without chlorophyll which in the dim light look like ghosts, and if you shine a torch beam on them they appear to be translucent white in the pitch darkness, almost like a photographic negative."